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A HISTORY OF 
LIFE IN THE UNITED STATES 



THE BEGINNERS OF A NATION 

A HISTORY OF THE SOURCE AND RISE 
OF THE EARLIEST ENGLISH SETTLE- 
MENTS IN AMERICA WITH SPECIAL 
REFERENCE TO THE LIFE AND 
CHARACTER OF THE PEOPLE 



BY 



/ 

EDWARD EGGLESTON 




v*-... 



ioa^i'^ 



\\ 



NEW YORK 

D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1896 



'mr 






Copyright, 1896, 
By EDWARD EGGLESTON. 



TO 

THE RIGHT HONORABLE JAMES BRYCE, M.P. 

My dear Mr. Bryce : 

In giving an account of the origins of the United 
States, I have told a story of English achievement. It 
is fitting that I should inscribe it to you, who of all the 
Englishmen of this generation have rendered the most emi- 
nent service to the American Commojizvealth. You have 
shotun with admirable clearness and candor, and zvith 
marvelous breadth of thought and sympathy, what are the 
results in the present time of the English beginnings in 
America, and to you, therefore, I offer this volume. I 
need not assure you that it gives me great pleasure to 
ivrite your name here as godfather to my book, and to 
subscribe myself, my dear Mr. Bryce, 

Yours very sincerely, 

Edward Eggleston. 



PREFACE. 



In this work, brought to completion after many 
years of patient research, I have sought to trace from 
their source the various and often complex movements 
that resulted in the early English settlements in Amer- 
ica, and in the evolution of a great nation with English 
speech and traditions. It has been my aim to make 
these pages reflect the character of the age in which 
the English colonies were begun, and the traits of the 
colonists, and to bring into relief the social, political, 
intellectual, and religious forces that promoted emigra- 
tion. This does not pretend to be the usual account 
of all the events attending early colonization; it is 
rather a history in which the succession of cause and 
effect is the main topic — a history of the dynamics of 
colony-planting in the first half of the seventeenth cen- 
tury. Who were the beginners of English life in Amer- 
ica ? What propulsions sent them for refuge to a wil- 
derness ? What visions beckoned them to undertake 
the founding of new states ? What manner of men were 
their leaders ? And what is the story of their hopes, 
their experiments, and their disappointments ? These 
are the questions I have tried to answer. 

The founders of the little settlements that had the 
unexpected fortune to expand into an empire I have 
not been able to treat otherwise than unreverently. 
Here are no forefathers or foremothers, but simply Eng- 
lish men and women of the seventeenth century, with 
the faults and fanaticisms as well as the virtues of 
their age. I have disregarded that convention which 



Preface. 



VIU 



TJie Beginners of a Nation. 



Preface. 



makes it obligatory for a writer of American history 
to explain that intolerance in the first settlers was not 
just like other intolerance, and that their cruelty and in- 
justice were justifiable under the circumstances. This 
walking backward to throw a mantle over the nakedness 
of ancestors may be admirable as an example of dilu- 
vian piety, but it is none the less reprehensible in the 
writing of history. 

While the present work is complete in itself, it is also 
part of a larger enterprise, as the half-title indicates. 
In January, 1880, I began to make studies for a History 
of Life in the United States. For the last sixteen or 
seventeen years by far the greater part of my time has 
been given to researches on the culture history of the 
United States in the period of English domination, that 
" good old colony time " about which w^e have had more 
sentiment than information. As year after year was 
consumed in this toilsome preparation, the magnitude 
of the task became apparent, and I began to feel the 
fear for my work so felicitously expressed by Ralegh, 
" that the darkness of age and death would have cov- 
ered over both it and me before the performance." It 
seemed better, therefore, to redeem from the chance of 
such mishap a portion of my work, by completing this 
most difficult part of the task, in order that when, early 
or late, the inevitable night shall fall, the results of my 
labor, such as they are, may not be wholly covered over 
by the darkness. 

There is always difference of opinion in regard to 
the comparative fullness with which the several portions 
of a historical narrative should be treated, and I can 
not hope to escape criticism on this point. I have re- 
lated some events with what will be considered dispro- 
portionate amplitude of detail. But the distinctive pur- 
pose of this work is to give an insight into the life and 
character of the people, and there are details that make 
the reader feel the very spirit and manner of the time. 
It is better to let the age disclose itself in action ; it 



Preface. 



IX 



is only by ingenious eavesdropping and peeps through 
keyholes that we can win this kind of knowledge from 
the past. Literary considerations should have some 
weight in deciding how fully an episode shall be treat- 
ed, unless the historian is content to perform the homely 
service of a purveyor of the crude ore of knowledge. 
I have sought to make this " a work of art as well as of 
historical science," to borrow a phrase from Augustin 
Thierry. Some omissions in this volume will be ex- 
plained when its successors appear. 

I find it an embarrassing task to make acknowledg- 
ment to those who have assisted me ; the debts that 
have accumulated since I began are too many to be 
recorded. I must not neglect to express my grateful 
remembrance of the hospitality shown to my researches 
during my various sojourns in England. At the British 
Museum and at the Public Record Ofifice every facility 
has been extended to me, and a similar attention was 
shown to my wants at other less public repositories of 
books, such as the Society for the Propagation of the 
Gospel. To Dr. Richard Garnett, the head of the print- 
ed book department of the Museum, I owe thanks for 
many personal attentions. I am also indebted to Mr. 
E. M. Thompson, keeper of the manuscripts in the mu- 
seum. The late Mr. W. Noel Sainsbury, of the Public 
Record Ofifice, was very obliging. I owe most of all to 
the unfailing kindness of the Right Honorable James 
Bryce, M. P., who found time, in the midst of his pre- 
occupations as a member of Parliament and his duties 
in high office, to secure for me access to private stores 
of historical material. Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice with 
generous kindness put himself to much trouble to facili- 
tate my examination of the manuscripts at Landsdowne 
House. I am indebted to Lord Leconsfield for permis- 
sion to visit Petworth House and read there Percy's 
Trewe Relacion in the original manuscript. I must ask 
others in England who befriended my researches to ac- 
cept a general acknowledgment, but I can not forget 



Preface. 



The Beginners of a Nation. 



their courtesy to a stranger. In common with other 
students I received polite attentions during my re- 
searches in Paris at the BibHotheque Nationale. 

In this country I owe much to the Ubrarians of pub- 
lic libraries and their assistants — too much to allow me 
to specify my obligations to individuals. At the Astor, 
and at the Lenox, under its more recent management, 
my debt has been continual for many years. Acknowl- 
edgments are due to the officers of the Boston Public 
Library, the Library of Congress, the Peabody Institute 
in Baltimore, and the libraries of the New York, the 
Massachusetts, the Pennsylvania, the Maryland, and the 
Virginia Historical Societies. To Harvard College Li- 
brary and to the New York State Library I am specially 
indebted ; from them I have been able to supplement 
my own collection by borrowing. The Brooklyn Mer- 
cantile Library has granted me similar privileges. The 
New York Mercantile Library, on the other hand, I have 
not found hospitable to research. 

To my generous friend Mr. Justin Winsor I ovre 
thanks for many favors. Dr. Thomas Addis Emmet 
opened his valuable collection to me, and the late Mr. 
S. L. M. Barlow showed me similar kindness. My friend, 
Mr. Oscar S. Straus, permitted me to use at my own 
desk valuable works from his collection. There are 
others whose friendly attentions can be more fitly rec- 
ognized in later volumes of this series, and yet others 
whom I must beg to accept this general but grateful 
acknowledgment. 

Mr. W. W. Duffield, the Superintendent of the Coast 
and Geodetic Survey, supplied the artist with the coast 
charts from which the maps in this volume were drawn. 

To avoid misapprehension, it is needful to say that 
this is not a re-issue of anything I have heretofore 
produced. The lectures on the culture history of the 
United States given at Columbia College and other in- 
stitutions were never written or reported. The papers 
on colonial life contributed to the Century Magazine in 



Preface. 



XI 



1882, and the years following, were on a different plan 
and scale ; they have merely served the purpose of pre- 
liminary studies of the general subject. To the editor 
and publishers of the Century Magazine I am obliged 
for their courtesy in all affairs relating to my contract 
with them, and for an arrangement which enables me to 
have free use of my material. 



Preface. 



Joshua's Rock, Lake George, October, li 



CONTENTS. 



BOOK I. 
EISE OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY. 

CHAPTER THE FIRST. 

PAGE 

English Knowledge and Notion of America at 
THE Period of Settlement i 

CHAPTER the SECOND. 

James River Experiments 25 

chapter the third. 
The Procession of Motives 73 

BOOK II. 

THE PURITAN MIGRATION. 

chapter the first. 
Rise and Development of Puritanism ... 98 

chapter the second. 
Separatism and the Scrooby Church . . .141 

CHAPTER the THIRD. 

The Pilgrim Migrations 159 

chapter the fourth, 

The Great Puritan Exodus 188 

xiii 



Contents. 



XIV 



The Beginners of a Nation. 



Contents. 


BOOK III. 






CENTRIFUGAL FORCES IN COLONY 


-PLANTING. 




CHAPTER THE FIRST. 


PAGE 




The Catholic Migration . 


. 220 




CHAPTER THE SECOND. 






The Prophet of Religious Freedom 


, 266 




CHAPTER THE THIRD. 






New England Dispersions . 


. 315 


Maps. 


LIST OF MAPS. 





(In the coast line the American maps follow the charts of the United 
States Coast and Geodetic Survey ; the third map conforms to the British 
Ordnance Survey.) 



I. — Chesapeake Bay . 
II. — James River 
III.— The cradle of the Pilgrims. 
IV.— Coast e.xplored by the Pilgrims 
v.— The colony at St. Mary's . 
VI.— Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth 
VII.— The early settlements on Narragansett Bay 
VIII.— New England after the dispersions . 



FACING 
PAGE 



275 
296 

343 



BOOK I. 

RISE OF THE FIRST ENGLISH COLONY. 



CHAPTER THE FIRST. 

ENGLISH KNOWLEDGE AND NOTIONS OF AMERICA 
AT THE PERIOD OF SETTLEMENT. 



The age of Elizabeth and James — the age of 
Spenser, of Shakespeare, and of Bacon — was a new 
point of departure in the history of the English 
race. All the conditions excited men to unwonted 
intellectual activity. The art of printing was yet 
a modern invention ; the New World with its nov- 
elties and unexplained mysteries was a modern 
discovery; and there were endless discussions and 
agitations of spirit growing out of the recent refor- 
mation in religion. Imagination was powerfully 
stimulated by the progress of American explora- 
tion, by the romantic adventures of the Spaniards 
in the West Indies, and their dazzling conquest of 
new-found empires in Mexico and Peru. It was 
an age of creation in poetry, in science, and in re- 
ligion, and men of action were everywhere set on 
deeds of daring. The world had regained some- 
thing of the vigor and spontaneity of youth, but 



Chap. I. 



The Eliza- 
bethan 
age. 



Rise of the First ColoJiy. 



Book I. 



Credulity 

about 

America. 



George 
Beste, 
First Voy- 
age of Sir 
Martin 
Frobisher. 



the credulity and curiosity of youth were not want- 
ing. The mind of the time accepted and reveled in 
marvelous stories. The stage plays of that drama- 
loving age reflected the interest in the supernatu- 
ral and the eager curiosity about far-away coun- 
tries. Books of travel fitted the prevailing taste. 
He who could afford to buy them regaled himself 
with the great folios of Hakluyt's Vo3'ages and 
Purchas his Pilgrimes. General readers delighted 
in little tracts and pamphlets relating incidents of 
far-away travels, or describing remote countries 
and the peoples inhabiting them, or the " mon- 
strous strange beasts " found in lands beyond the 
bounds of Christendom. 

America excited the most lively curiosity as a 
world by itself and the least known of all the 
" four parts " into which the globe was then di- 
vided. There were those, indeed, who made six 
parts of the world by adding an arctic continent, 
which included Greenland and a vast southern land 
supposed to stretch from Magellan's Strait south- 
ward to the pole. It was easy to believe in these 
two superfluous continents ; they were mirages of 
the New World. Every great discovery excites ex- 
pectation of others like it. And in a time when 
vague report or well-worn tradition counted for 
more than observation or experimental knowledge, 
it was inevitable that current information about 
America should be distorted and mixed with fable. 
In that age, still pre-Baconian, men had few stand- 
ards by which to measure probabilities, and to 



English Notions of America. 



those shut in by the narrow limits of mediasval 
knowledge the mere uncovering of a new conti- 
nent whose existence contravened the fixed beliefs 
of the ages was so marvelous that nothing told 
about it afterward seemed incredible. 

The history of American exploration is a story 
of delusion and mistake. The New World was 
discovered because it lay between Europe and the 
East Indian Spice Islands by the westward route, 
Columbus, seeking the less, found the greater by 
stumbling on it in the dark. Zuan Caboto — in 
English, John Cabot — who is described by a con- 
temporary as " a Venetian fellow with a fine mind, 
greatly skilled in navigation," discovered North 
America in 1497. But he did not exult that he 
was the finder of a vast and fertile continent in 
which great nations might germinate, for he be- 
lieved that his landfall at Cape Breton was within 
the dominions of the Grand Cham of China, and 
he sailed down the coast again the next year, " ever 
with the intent to find said passage to India." It 
was announced on his return from his first voyage 
that Henry VII had " won a part of Asia without 
a stroke of the sword." 

The discovery of the Pacific by Balboa in 15 13, 
and the voyage of Magellan's ship across that ocean 
in 1520, were not sufficient to remove the illusion 
that America was connected with Asia. The no- 
tion that the New World was an Asiatic peninsula 
died lingeringly about the middle of the sixteenth 
century ; but to reach Asia was still the main pur- 1 



Chap. I. 



Illusions 
of discov- 
erers. 



Note I. 



Rise of the First Colony 



Book I. 



Note 2. 



Frobisher, 



Frobisher's 
Voyages, 
Hakl. Sec, 
passim. 



pose of western exploration, and America was for 
a long time regarded mainly as an obstruction. 
The belief in a passage to the Pacific by means 
of some 3^et-to-be-discovered strait severing the 
continent of America, survived far into the seven- 
teenth century, and the hope of coming by some 
short cut into a rich commerce with the Orient led 
to a prying exploration of all the inlets, bays, and 
estuaries on the American coast and so promoted 
discovery, but it retarded settlement by blinding 
men to the value of the New World. 

II. 

Adventure by sea became a favorite road to 
renown for ambitious Englishmen in the time of 
Elizabeth, and the belief in a passage through or 
round North America grew into a superstition. 
The discovery of this strait seemed, in the phrase 
of George Beste, a writer of the time, " the onely 
thing of the world that was left undone whereby 
a notable mind might be made famous and fortu- 
nate." Sir Martin Frobisher, who is reckoned by 
Camden "among the famousest men of our age for 
counsell and glory gotten at sea," made three voy- 
ages in 1576 and the following years to that part 
of the American coast almost under the arctic 
circle. He desisted from the attempt to get to 
China by an arctic channel only when he had in- 
volved the " venturers " or stockholders associated 
with him in heavy debts, and spent the fortune of 
his wife and stepchildren, to whom " glor}^ gotten 



English Notions of America. 



at sea " must have been insufficient compensation. 
" Sir Martin Frobisher whome God forgive " is the 
phrase in which he is spoken of by his wife. 

In the year of Frobisher's first voyage, Sir 
Humphrey Gilbert issued a treatise to prove that 
there was a way to the East Indies round North 
America. This he demonstrated by a hydra- 
headed argument constructed after the elaborate 
fashion of that unscientific age, proving the exist- 
ence of a northwest passage, first by authority, 
secondly by reason, thirdly by experience of sun- 
dry men's travels, and fourthly by circumstance. 
Not content with getting to China by logic, and 
nothing daunted by Frobisher's brilliant failure, 
Gilbert mortgaged his estate that he might engage 
in attempts yet more disastrous than Frobisher's, 
and lost his life during his second voyage, in 1584. 

About this time there appeared on the scene 
the famous geographer, Richard Hakluyt, one of 
those men that exert a marked influence in favor of 
a new movement mainly by ardor and industry. 
Hakluyt's fervor was akin to enthusiasm, his be- 
lief of every story favorable to projects for colo- 
nization, and his unwavering faith in the projects 
themselves bordered on flat credulity. To men of 
his own time his tireless advocacy of American ex- 
ploration and colony-planting must have seemed 
irksome hobby-riding. But he was the indispen- 
sable forerunner of colonization. " Your Mr. Hak- 
luyt hath served for a very good trumpet," says 
Sidney. Believing in everything American as un- 



Chap. I. 



Gilbert. 



Haies in 

Hakl.Voy,, 

184-227. 



Hakluyt. 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Hakl. Disc, 
on Western 
Planting. 



N. Y. Col. 
Docs. I, i6. 



waveringly as if his soul's salvation depended on 
his faith, he believed in nothing more sublimely 
than in a passage to the " South Sea " or Pacific 
Ocean. He seized on every vague intimation of 
ignorant map-makers, on every suspicion of an 
explorer, on every fond tale of an Indian that 
tended to lend support to the theory in hand. All 
evidence was of equal weight in his scales, pro- 
vided it lay on the affirmative side of the balance. 
It mattered little to him where his witnesses placed 
this elusive passage. In Hakluyt's mind it was 
ubiquitous. The Pacific is now " on the backside " 
of Montreal Island, and the great Laurentian lakes 
suffer a sea change ; now it is reached by a river 
flowing three months to the southward — that is, 
the Mississippi. Then the much-sought strait is 
carried northward on the authority of an old map 
— " a great old round carde " — shown him " by the 
King- of Portingall." But he had also seen " a 
mightie large old mappe in parchment " which 
showed, as far south as latitude 40°, a little neck 
of land " much like the streyte neck or Isthmus of 
Darienna." He had seen the same isthmus on an- 
other old map " with the sea joynninge hard on 
both sides as it doth on Panama." In a paper 
meant for private use, he expresses solicitude that 
the nearness of the Pacific to Florida shall not be- 
come known too commonly. Many years later an 
injunction was granted in Holland forbidding a 
publisher to insert in a map the newly discovered 
channel into the South Sea. 



English Notions of America. 



III. 

Both Frobisher and Gilbert made ineffectual 
attempts to plant colonies in the new lands, but 
colony-planting held a place in their minds quite 
secondary to the search for the South Sea in the 
north and the finding of gold. It was only when 
the large and lucid mind of Sir Walter Ralegh 
took up the subject seriously that the settlement of 
an agricultural colony became for a while the real 
object of American voyages. Ralegh sent no men 
to the arctic or to the wintry shores of Newfound- 
land, as Frobisher and Gilbert had done. He 
turned to milder latitudes, and dispatched his ex- 
plorers in 1584, and his colonists in 1585, to the 
coast of what is now North Carolina. 

But the ever-mischievous South Sea delusion 
did not vanish when the period of colonization was 
reached. Ralph Lane, the governor of Ralegh's 
first colony on Roanoke Island, having inquired 
perhaps for that western sea which Hakluyt had 
seen "on the mightie old mappe in parchment," 
understood the inventive savages to say that the 
Roanoke River sprang from a rock so near to a 
sea that the waves in storm often dashed into this 
fountain, making the river brackish for some dis- 
tance below. That the story might be more inter- 
esting, they added that there was gold there, and 
that the walls of a town in that land were made of 
pearls. This is what the white men fancied the 
Indians said ; but whatever they said was spoken in 



Chap. I. 



Ralegh, 



Ralph 
Lane's 
quest. 



Rise of the First Colony, 



Book I. 



Note 3. 



Lane's Ac- 
count in 
Hakl. III. 



Note 4. 



Seeking 
the Pacific 
Qn James 
River. 



a tongue of which Lane's men had but the most 
scanty knowledge, if indeed it were not given 
mainly by signs. Nothing dispirited by the ex- 
travagance of these tales, Lane and some of his 
men set out to immortalize and enrich themselves — 
like a company of children running after the pot of 
gold at the end of the rainbow. While the crafty 
Indians were plotting the destruction of the colo- 
nists left behind, the governor and his followers 
pursued their quest until they were obliged to eat 
their dogs, made palatable by seething with a 
dressing of sassafras leaves. The}^ returned, half 
famished and wholly disappointed, just in time to 
rescue the colony from destruction. But faith is 
faith, and despite his severe experience Lane went 
back to England believing that the Roanoke rose 
near to the Bay of Mexico " that openeth out into 
the South Sea." The map which the colonists 
brought with them when they abandoned the coun- 
try in 1586 handed down the delusion, in another 
form, by showing a strait leading from the neigh- 
borhood of Port Royal into a body of water to the 
westward. 

IV. 

Twenty years after the return of Ralegh's first 
colonists the Jamestown company was sent to 
plant the germ of an English-speaking nation in 
North America. Beginning with the first voyage 
of Columbus, the search for a route through Amer- 
ica had lasted a hundred and fourteen years. No 



English Notions of America. 



passage north of Magellan's Strait had been found, ^"^^- ^• 
yet a belief in the existence of such a water-way 
remained a part of the geographical creed of the 
time. The Jamestown emigrants were official- 
ly instructed to explore that branch of any river 
that lay toward the northwest, perhaps because 
the charmed latitude of 40° might thus be reached. 
It was in carrying out this instruction that Cap- 
tain John Smith came to grief at the hands of 
the Indians while looking for the Pacific in the 
swamps of the Chickahominy. Smith rarely mixed 
his abounding romance with his geography ; he is 
as sober and trustworthy in topographical descrip- 
tion and in map-making as he is imaginative in 
narration. But Smith was at this time under the 
influence of the prevailing delusion, and he hoped 
that his second voyage up the Chesapeake would 
lead him into the Pacific. His belief in a pas- 
sage to the westward in latitude 40°, just be- 
yond the northward limit of his own explora- 
tions, he communicated to his friend Henry Hud- 
son, who was so moved by it that he sailed to 
America in 1609 in violation of his orders, and in 
seeking the strait to the South Sea penetrated the 
solitudes of the picturesque river that bears his 
name. The explorer Dermer was intent on win- 
ning immortality by finding a passage to the Pa- 
cific when, in 1619, he was storm-driven into Long 
Island Sound. At Manhattan Island, or thereabout, 
he got information from the obliging Indians that 
made plain his way to the Orient. He was very 



Hudson. 



Dermer. 



10 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note 5. 



Sandys'3 
plan. 



Note 6. 



Luke Fox. 



Northwest. 
Fox, p. 172. 



secretive about this route, which, however, seems 
to have lain through Delaware Bay. 

A false notion once generally accepted is able 
to live in some ghostly shape after the breath is 
out of its body. The hope of a passage to the Pa- 
cific by means of a strait and the belief in a narrow 
isthmus in latitude 40° could not long survive the 
increase of knowledge that followed the settlement 
of Virginia and Captain Smith's explorations. But 
sixteen years after the landing at Jamestown, when 
these two geographical jack-o'-lanterns had ceased 
to flicker, the poet George Sandy's, who was sec- 
retary of the colony, wrote that he was ready to 
venture his life in finding a way to the South Sea, 
but this wa}^ was now to be by an overland route. 
About the same time Henry Briggs, the famous 
Savile lecturer at Oxford, proved to the satisfac- 
tion of many that the rivers running westward 
from the Virginia mountains must reach the Pacific 
in about one hundred and fifty miles. One Marma- 
duke Parkinson, an explorer sailing in the Potomac, 
confirmed the theory of the learned mathematician 
by discovering in the house of a chief a " China 
Boxe," whatever that may have been. In 1631 
Luke Fox set sail by the northwest, carr}ing a let- 
ter from Charles I addressed " to the Emperor of 
Japan," which he probabl)^ was not able to deliver. 
In 1634 Captain Thomas Yong got as far as the 
falls of the Delaware in the endeavor to go through 
the continent in latitude 40°. The strait and isth- 
mus and northwest passage having failed, Yong 



English Notions of America. 



II 



was content to go by fresh water till he should 
reach a Mediterranean Sea in the heart of America, 
which he believed to open into both the " North 
Ocean " and the South Sea. As the century ad- 
vanced the fresh-water route had in turn to be 
finally abandoned, and seekers after the Pacific 
were fain to betake themselves to dry-shod travel, 
and even to mountain-climbing, as George Sandys 
had proposed. A Colonel Catlet is mentioned who 
reached the AUeghanies in the endeavor to find a 
river flowing westward, but he was daunted by 
what seemed to him almost impassable ranges of 
mountains that barred his way. Over these " rocky 
hills and sandy desarts" scarce a bird was seen to 
fly. In 1669, Lederer, a German surveyor, set out 
from Virginia on a similar futile exploration. As 
late as 1700 the well-informed Lawson speaks hope- 
fully of the proximity of the Pacific to North Caro- 
lina. This fallacy had prompted many desperate 
adventures, and had been the cause of man}^ impor- 
tant discoveries, in the two centuries that it held 
possession of men's minds. It reached its last at- 
tenuation in 1765, when the public prints announced 
that large boats were fitting out at Quebec to try 
the whale-fishing in Lake Ontario, and that " they 
have hopes of finding a communication by water 
with the western ocean, founded on the favorable 
reports of some Indians, who inform that a river 
runs westward many hundreds of miles as large as 
the Mississippi." 



Chap. I. 

Weston 
Documents 
45 and 47 
andff. 



Catlet and 
Lederer. 

Glover, 
in Phil. 
Trans. , xi, 
626. Comp. 
Perfect 
Descr. of 
Va., 1649, 
and Leder- 
er's Voy- 
age. 

Lawson's 
Carolina, 
47- 



Scot's 
Magazine, 
1765, page 
161. 



12 



Rise of the First Colony 



Book I. 



Gold- 
hunting. 



Hakluyt. 
Pref. to 
Va., mag- 
nified. 



Pilgrim- 
age, 793. 



V. 

As the mistake made by Colum.bus had left for 
heritage an almost ineradicable passion for the dis- 
covery of a westward sea way to Japan and China, 
so the vast treasure of gold and silver drawn by 
the Spaniards from Mexico and Peru produced a 
belief in the English mind that a colony planted at 
any place on the American coast might find gold. 
Here, again, the undoubting Hakluyt and other 
writers after him were ready with learned conclu- 
sions balancing on the tight rope of very slender 
premises. If an Indian had been seen wearing a 
piece of copper that " bowed easily," this flexibility 
proved it to be tarnished gold. If a savage seemed 
to say in his idiom, or by gestures and other signs, 
something which the puzzled newcomers took to 
signify that in a country farther on the copper was 
too soft for use, or that it was yellow, or that it 
had a good luster, what further evidence could an 
ingenious writer desire of the existence of the pre- 
cious metal in that country ? Purchas, the suc- 
cessor of Hakluyt in geographical research, ex- 
plains the divine purpose in thus endowing a 
heathen land with gold, which is that the Indian 
race " as a rich bride, though withered and de- 
formed, . . . might find many suitors for love of 
her portion," and thus the pagans be converted. 
But Purchas filches both the simile and the pious 
thought from Herrera, who in turn probably pil- 
fered it with many better things from the good 



English Notions of America. 



13 



Las Casas. Purchas also speaks with more opti- 
mism than elegance of the " silver bowels and 
golden entrails of the hills," as though one had but 
to dig into the first mountain to be enriched. 

Frobisher brought home from sub-arctic islands 
what his clumsy assayers avouched to be " gold 
cure." Refining works were erected for this stuff 
at Deptford to no profit, and to this day the in- 
quisitive student is not able to ascertain from the 
conflicting reports whether there was any gold in 
the ore or not. The main causes of the suffering 
at Jamestown during the first winter were the 
waste of time and the consumption of supplies 
while lading the ships with the glittering " dust 
mica " which is so abundant in the Virginia sands. 
The worthlessness of this cargo could not weaken 
the hopes of those alchemists who were able to 
produce gold merely by the use of arguments. The 
mines in Virginia moved farther west. It wanted 
only that explorers should reach the mountains. In 
spite of the sickness that wasted the colony in 1610, 
Lord De la Warr sent an expedition to dig gold 
on the upper James, but the warlike up-river tribes 
soon drove the prospectors back. In 1634, Sir John 
Harvey sent another body of men on the same 
fool's errand, though there had not been found in 
all the years preceding a particle of tangible evi- 
' dence that gold existed in Virginia. But on the 
James, as on the Hudson, the glistering pigment 
with which the Indians besmeared their faces on 
occasions of display was believed to contain gold. 



Chap. I. 



Frobish- 
er's gold. 



Early 
Virginia 
gold-hunt- 
ing. 



14 



Rise of the First Colo?!}'. 



Book I. 

Note 7. 

Fact and 
fable 
about 
America. 



Ingram's 
story. 



and the places of its procurement were sought 
with ludicrous secrecy. 

The unfaltering faith in the existence of abun- 
dant gold on the eastern coast of North America 
could not have subsisted on thin air so long if it 
had not been stimulated by the almost fabulous 
wealth drawn from South America by Spain. It 
had received encouragement also from the tales 
told by adventurers returned from America, who 
seem to have thought it necessary to bring back 
stories that would match in some degree the preva- 
lent beliefs about the New World. The earliest 
but one of all the documents relating to America 
preserved among the British state papers is the 
statement of one David or Davy Ingram. With a 
hundred other luckless seamen he was put ashore 
in Mexico by Sir John Hawkins, because the ship 
lacked provisions. Ingram, traveling from tribe to 
tribe, achieved the notable feat of crossing the con- 
tinent in a year. In 1569 he embarked on a French 
ship that he found near the mouth of the St. John 
River in what is now the province of New Bruns- 
wick. It was eleven years later that Davy Ingram, 
at home in England, made his statement, and the 
sailor's story had by that time gained much, per- 
haps, by frequent telling to wonder-loving listeners. 
Sometimes he relates facts with sobriety, speaking 
the truth by relapse, it may be ; again, he seems to 
be repeating tales told him by the savages, who 
were habitual marvel-mongers, or weaving into 
the account of what he had seen legends common 



English Notions of America. 



15 



in the folklore about America that had grown 
up in Europe ; or perchance he only falls into an 
old forecastle habit of incontinent lying without 
provocation. The American women are described 
as " wearing great plates of gold covering their 
whole bodies like armor. ... In every cottage 
pearls are to be found, and in some houses a peck " 
— an assertion that had a grain of truth in it, since 
the sailor no doubt mistook wampum beads for 
pearls. Fireflies, in this old tar's exalted mem- 
ory, are " fire dragons, which make the air very red 
as they fly," while the buffalo appears as an animal 
" as big as two of our oxen." The streets in one 
" city " are broader than London streets, which we 
may readily believe. The banqueting houses are 
built of crystal, " with pillars of massie silver, some 
of gold." This is a fine example of the manner of 
a mind afflicted with the vice of exaggeration ; 
crystal becomes silver in the next breath, and sil- 
ver is as instantly transmuted to gold. All that 
optimistic projectors sought in America — gold, sil- 
ver, pearls by the peck, and great abundance of 
silkworms — are obligingly supplied in Ingram's 
narrative. Such tales impressed the imagination 
in a romantic and uncritical age. 

VI. 

The interest in America was heightened by 
popular curiosity regarding the Indians. The 
American savag-es were sometimes treated as sun- 
worshipers, but they were more commonly thought 



Chap. I. 



Note 8. 



Indian 
devil- 
worship. 



i6 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



to be worshipers of devils. The prevailing belief in 
witchcraft, divination, and abounding evil spirits 
rendei'ed it easy for Europeans to accept the Indian 
deities as supernatural beings, and to credit the pre- 
tensions of the powwows, or Indian priests, to give 
knowledge of distant or future events, to heal the 
sick, and even to bring rain in time of drought. But 
it was observed at Plymouth that when the Pilgrims 
prayed for rain it fell gently, and that the rain pro- 
cured by the Indian conjurers was violent and de- 
structive — a rain with something devilish about it. 
According to writers of the time, the demons wor- 
shiped by the savages were able to materialize 
themselves on great occasions, appearing to their 
votaries in some beastly form. This belief in In- 
dian devil-woi-ship fitted well with the religious 
faith of the period, which can hardly be described 
as anything but a sort of Manichseism dividing the 
government of the universe almost equally be- 
tween good and evil powers. Religionists of all 
schools desired to convert these subjects of Satan, 
not from those philanthropic motives that are main 
considerations in modern propagandism, but be- 
cause their conversion would glorify God, and yet 
more because it would despite the devil. Some- 
times the religious motive was incongruously sup- 
ported by hopes of commercial advantage. The 
navigator Davis wrote to Secretary Walsingham 
that if the Indians " were once brought over to the 
Christian faith they might soon be brought to rel- 
ish a more civilized kind of life and be thereby in- 



English Notions of America. 



17 



duced to take off great quantities of our coarser 
woolen manufactures." 

The early explorers made a practice of kidnap- 
ing Indians and transporting them to England, 
where the sight of barbarians without doublet or 
hose quickened the interest in projects for colo- 
nization and adventure. In our age of commercial 
activity and extended geographical knowledge one 
can form but a weak conception of the excitement 
produced by the sight of " the Indian man and 
woman," no doubt Esquimaux, brought by Fro- 
bisher. Portraits of these rarities were made for 
the king and queen and others. In 1605 Wey- 
mouth brought from the coast of Maine five kid- 
napped Indians, " with all their bows and arrows" 
and two beautiful birch-bark canoes. " This acci- 
dent," exclaimed Sir Ferdinando Gorges, " hath 
been the means of putting life into all our planta- 
tions." Some of the savages captured at various 
times were exhibited for money, and one perhaps 
was shown after he was dead ; at least we may ven- 
ture to conjecture so much from Shakespeare's 
jeer in The Tempest at the idle curiosity of the 
crowd. In England, says Trinculo, " any strange 
beast makes a man. When they will not give a 
doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will lay out ten 
to see a dead Indian." This interest in outlandish 
savages no doubt suggested to the poet the crea- 
tion of the monster Caliban, who probably seemed 
a realistic figure to the imagination of that age. 



Chap. I. 



Indians 
exhibited. 



Rosier's 
True Rela- 
tion. 



Tempest, 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Notions 

about 

animals. 



Note 9. 



Evelyn's 
Diary, i, 
277. 

Wood's 
New Eng. 
Prospect, 
P-23. 



VII. 

The animals of the new continent excited the 
wonder of the people of Europe and increased the 
interest in America. Regarding them, also, the 
most extravagant stories were easily credited. It 
was recorded in the sober Latin of Peter Martyr 
that the advance of Cabot's ships was retarded by 
the multitude of codfish on the Newfoundland 
coast, and that the bears were accustomed to catch 
these fish in their claws. It is hard to recognize 
the familiar opossum in the description by Pur- 
chas : " A monstrous deformed beast, whose fore 
part resembleth a fox, the hinder part an ape, ex- 
cepting the feet, which are like a man's ; beneath 
her belly she hath a receptacle like a purse, where 
she bestows her young until they can shift for 
themselves." The humming bird was believed to 
be a cross between a fly and a bird. The Hudson 
River Dutch settlers went further, and named it 
simply " the West Indian bee." These dainty 
creatures were prepared for exportation to Europe 
in New Amsterdam by drying them, in Barbadoes 
by filling them with sand. They were accounted 
" pretty delicacies for ladies, who wore them at 
their breasts and girdles." Evelyn saw two pre- 
served as great rarities at Oxford, in 1564. A New 
England versifier extols 

The humbird for some queen's rich cage more fit 
Than in the vacant wilderness to sit. 

Flying squirrels, when brought into English 



English Notions of America, 



19 



parks in 1608, were the occasion of much wonder- 
ing excitement. King James begged for one of 
them, like a spoiled child. The skins of muskrats 
were esteemed for their odor and were brought to 
England " as rich presents." It was thought that 
musk might be extracted from this animal. Ha- 
riot, the learned man of Ralegh's first colon}-, fan- 
cied that the civet cat would prove profitable to 
settlers in America, but his words indicate that he 
had been misled by traces of the skunk, whose per- 
fume has never yet come into request. Speaking 
of the " civet catte," he says, " in our travails there 
was found one to have been killed by a salvage or 
inhabitant ; and in many places the smell where 
one had lately beene before." 

The raccoon, the " aroughcun " of the Virginia 
Indians, being a plantigrade, was esteemed a mon- 
key ; the peccaries were called the wild hogs of 
America, and were thought to have " their navels 
on the ridge of their backs." Somewhere in the 
region of the Hudson River a beast is described as 
having a horn in the middle of his forehead, from 
which it would appear that the unicorn on the 
royal coat of arms may have been found running 
at large. It is not easy to account for the " camel 
mare," reported to have been seen about three 
hundred miles west from the coast of New Jersey, 
unless it belonged to the genus Incubus. The be- 
wildering number of new creatures found in Amer- 
ica troubled the European scholars of that day, 
who were ever theological. They were puzzled 



Chap. I. 



De Bry's 
Hariot, p. 



Note 10. 



20 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



An age of 
romance 
and adven- 
ture. 



to get so many four-footed beasts and creeping 
things into the compass of Noah's ark. Mercator, 
the Flemish geographer, avoided this difficult em- 
barkation by concluding that America had been 
excepted from the Deluge. 

VIII. 

Thus grotesque and misleading were many of 
the glimpses that Europe got of the New World 
as the mists of ignorance slowly lifted from it. 
These erratic notions regarding America give one 
an insight into the character of the English peo- 
ple at the period of discovery and colony-plant- 
ing. Credulity and the romantic spirit dwell to- 
gether. The imagination in such an age usurped 
the place of discrimination, and the wonderful be- 
came the probable. The appetite for the marvel- 
ous fostered exaggeration ; every man who had 
sailed in foreign seas thought it shame not to tell 
of wonders. The seventeenth century indeed be- 
trayed a consciousness of its own weakness in a 
current proverb, " Travelers lie by license." His- 
tory and fiction had not yet been separated. Like 
every other romantic age, the period of Elizabeth 
and James was prodigal of daring adventure ; every 
notable man aspired to be the hero of a tale. Eng- 
lish beginnings in America were thus made in a 
time abounding in bold enterprises — enterprises 
brilliant in conception, but in the execution of 
which there was often a lack of foresight and prac- 
tical wisdom. 



English Notions of America. 



21 



Elucidations. 

See the careful and learned discussion of the Voyages of 
Cabot by the late Charles Deane, in Winsor's Narrative and 
Critical History of America, vol. iii. Mr. Deane effectually de- 
stroys the delusion which so long gave the credit of this dis- 
covery, or a part of it, to Sebastian Cabot, the son of the real 
discoverer. Mr. Henry Harrisse, in John Cabot, the Discoverer of 
America, and in an earlier work, Jean et Sebastien Cabot, etc., 
reaches the same conclusion. He even doubts Sebastian's pres- 
ence in the expeditions of his father, John Cabot, etc., p. 48, 

Yet George Beste, who sailed with Frobisher, says : " Now 
men neede no more contentiously strive for roume to build an 
house on, or for a httle turffe of ground, . . . when great countreys 
and whole worldes offer and reache out themselves to them that 
will first voutsafe to possesse, inhabite, and till them." These 
countries, he says, " are fertile to bring forth all manner of corne 
and grayne, infinite sortes of land cattell, as horse, elephantes, 
kine, sheepe, great varietie of flying fowles of the ayre, as phes- 
ants, partridge, quayle, popingeys, ostridges, etc., infinite kinds 
of fruits, as almonds, dates, quinces, pomegranats, oringes, etc., 
holesome, medicinable, and delectable " (Frobisher's Voyages, 
Hakluyt Society, p. 38). 

Ralegh, in his History of the World, book i, chap, viii, sec. 
XV, has an interesting digression on the danger of trusting such 
communications, and he relates an anecdote of misapprehension 
by this very party sent under Grenville and Lane : " The same 
happened among the English, which I sent under Sir Richard 
Greeneville to inhabit Virginia. For when some of my people 
asked the name of that country, one of the savages answered, 
' Wingandacon,' which is as much as to say, as, ' You wear good 
cloaths,' or gay cloaths." From this answer it came that the 
coast of North Carolina was called "Wingandacon," or, in its 
Latinized form, Wingindacoa, while the chief, or " king," of the 
country appears in the narratives of the time as Wingina. Ralegh 
says that Yucatan means merely " What say you } " and that Peru 
got its name from a similar mistake. 

I found the original of this map among the drawings made by 
John White in the Grenville Collection in the British Museum. 



Chap. I. 



Note I, 
page 3. 



Note 2, 
page 4. 



^ 



Note 3, 
page 8. 



Note 4, 
page 8. 



22 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note 5, 
page lo. 



Note 6, 
page ID. 



NX 



Note 7, 
page 14. 



It was reproduced to accompany a paper of mine on the Vir- 
ginia Colony in the Century Magazine of November, 1882. It 
excited interest among scholars, as it was supposed to have been 
previously unknown. A copy was afterward found, however, in 
the collection made by Dr. Kohl for the State Department at 
Washington. The drawings in the Sloane MSS., British Museum, 
attributed to John White by Dr. E. E. Hale, in the Transactions 
of the American Antiquarian Society, iv, 21, are not White's 
originals. The latter are in the Grenville Collection. See my 
comparison of the two in The Nation of April 23, 1891. 

As late as December 5, 1621, in a letter from the Virginia 
Company to Governor Wyatt, these words occur : " The Con- 
jectures of the Southwest Passage and the piece of copper which 
you sent us gladly saw and heard." This long-surviving desire 
for a short passage to the East Indies is traceable to the passion 
that existed in Europe in the iifteenth and sixteenth centuries for 
spices, and this no doubt came from the gross forms of cookery 
in that time. Anderson's Commerce, sub anno 1504, cites Guicci- 
ardini on the great quantities of spices used, and adds : " For in 
those days the people of Europe v,'ere much fonder of spices in 
their cookery, etc., than they have been in later times." The rise 
in the price of commodities in Elizabeth's time may have been 
only apparent, but it promoted voyages looking to the extension 
of commerce. Compare Holinshed, i, 274. 

Waterhouse's Declaration of Virginia, 1622, a rare tract. Also 
Purchas, iii, 892, 893, where these words are quoted from Briggs : 
" The Indian Ocean, which we commonly call the South Sea, 
which lyeth on the West and Northwest Side of Virginia, on the 
other side of the mountains beyond our Falls [of James River] 
and openeth a free and faire passage, not only to China, Japan, 
and the Moluccas, but also to New Spaine, Peru, and Chili, and 
those rich countries of Terra Australis not as yet discovered." It 
is one of many marks of practical sagacity in Captain John Smith 
that after his experience on the American coast he was able to 
form views of the geography of the continent almost a century in 
advance of the opinions held in his time. He speaks of " those 
large Dominions which doe stretch themselves into the main 
God knoweth how many thousand miles " (Generall Historic, 
book vi). 

So late as 1626, Fleet, the only survivor of the massacre of 
Spelman's party, after spending five years in captivity among the 



English Notions of America. 



23 



Virginia Indians, persuaded a London merchant to intrust him 
with a vessel for the Indian trade by his stories of the " powder of 
gold " with which the savages made a paint for their faces. To 
this story he added a statement that he had often been in sight 
of the South Sea or Pacific Ocean. Fleet's Journal may be found 
in Scharf's History of Maryland, i, 13, etc. Van der Donck re- 
lates, in his description of New Netherland, that Kieft, the di- 
rector of New Netherland, and Van der Donck, found an Indian 
painting himself and bought the pigment, which being burned in 
a crucible yielded two pieces of gold. (See the translation in 
New York Historical Society Collection, ii, 161, 162.) A bag of 
specimens of the precious ores of the Hudson River region was 
sent to Holland by the ill-fated ship that sailed out of New 
Haven in 1645. The ship was seen no more except by the 
New Haven people, who beheld its specter in the sky. Of the 
Hudson River gold mines no specter has ever been seen in earth 
or sky. 

I have quoted from Mr. Sainsbury's abstract of the fragment 
in the British Public Record Office, but a similar statement by 
Ingram was inserted in Hakluyt's Divers Voyages in 1589. It 
was omitted in the later edition as too incredible even for Hak- 
luyt. See also a paper by Dr. De Costa, in the Magazine of 
American History, March, 1883, on the copy of Ingram's State- 
ment preserved in the Bodleian Library. Ingram's story, and 
others like it, seem to be satirized in the play of Eastward, Ho ! 
by Chapman, Jonson, and Marston. The assertion of Seagull, in 
the play, that " they have in their houses scowpes, buckets, and 
diverse other vessels of massie silver," would seem at first sight 
to be an unmistakable allusion to the extravagance of Ingram's 
narrative. But in the second edition of BuUein's A Dialogue 
against the Fever Pestilence, which was published in 1573, one 
Mendax, describing an unknown land, declares that " their pottes, 
panns, and all vessells are cleane gold garnished with dia- 
mondes." This shows that Ingram's story had probably ab- 
sorbed certain traits from what I have ventured to call European 
folklore tales about America — folk tales originally applied to the 
Orient, no doubt ; echoes of Sir John Mandeville and Marco 
Polo, perhaps. Of course it is just possible, but not probable, 
that BuUein had heard the tales of Ingram, who had returned 
three years or more before he printed his second edition. The 
authors of Eastward, Ho ! probably enlarged on Bullein. 



Chap. I. 



Note 8, 
page 15. 



24 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 
Note 9, 
page 1 8. 



Note lo, 
page 19. 



" Unguibusque inter squamas immissis," Decade III, book vi. 
These details are probably given on the authority of Sebastian 
Cabot, whose veracity is not above suspicion. 

Some of the early writers speak of "apes." Strachey calls 
what appears to be a raccoon a monkey, and Brickell, as late as 
1743, uses the same word. The peccaries are recorded as in the 
text by the marvel-loving Purchas, p. 805. One finds unicorns in 
Speed's Prospect, Description of New York. Speed also lets us 
know that the buffalo was accustomed to defend himself by vom- 
iting "a hot scalding liquor " on the dogs that chased it. Argall 
was the first Englishman to see the bison, in 161 3. Citing his 
letter, Purchas says, p. 943, " In one voyage . . . they found a 
slow kind of cattell as bigge as kine, which were good meate." 



CHAPTER THE SECOND. 

JAMES RIVER EXPERIMENTS. 



I. 

In December, 1606, there lay at Blackwall, 
below London, the Susan Constant, of one hundred 
tons, the Godspeed, of forty tons, and the little pin- 
nace Discovery, of but twenty tons — three puny 
ships to bear across the wintry Atlantic the begin- 
ners of a new nation. The setting forth of these 
argonauts produced much excitement in London. 
Patriotic feeling was deeply stirred, public prayers 
were offered for the success of the expedition, ser- 
mons appropriate to the occasion were preached, 
and the popular feeling was expressed in a poem 
by Michael Drayton. Even those who were too 
sober to indulge the vain expectations of gold 
mines and spice islands that filled the imaginations 
of most Englishmen on this occasion could say, as 
Lord Bacon did later: " It is with the kingdoms on 
earth as it is Avith the kingdom of heaven : some- 
times a grain of mustard seed proves a great tree. 
Who can tell ? " On the 19th of that most tem- 
pestuous December the little fleet weighed anchor 
and ran down on an ebb tide, no doubt, as one may 
nowadaj'S see ships rush past Blackwall toward the 
sea. Never were men engaged in a great enter- 
as 



Chap. II. 

Departure 
of the emi- 
grants. 



Ld. Chan- 
cellor's 
Speech in 
reply to the 
Speaker. 



26 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 
A. D. 1606. 



The law/s 

and 

orders. 



prise doomed to greater sorrows. From the time 
they left the Thames the ships were tossed and 
delayed by tempests, while the company aboard 
was rent by factious dissensions. 



II. 

Those who shaped the destinies of the colony 
had left little undone that inventive stupidity could 
suggest to assure the failure of the enterprise. 
King James, who was frivolously fond of puttering 
in novel projects, had personally framed a code of 
unwise laws and orders. The supremacy of the 
sovereign and the interests of the Church were 
pedantically guarded, but the colony was left with- 
out any ruler with authority enough to maintain 
order. The private interest of the individual, the 
most available of all motives to industry, was 
merged in that of the commercial company to 
which Virginia had been granted. All the prod- 
uce of the colony was to go into a common stock 
for five years, and the emigrants, men without 
families, were thrown into a semi-monastic trading 
community like the Hanseatic agencies of the time, 
with the saving element of a strong authority left 
out. Better devices for promoting indolence and 
aggravating the natural proneness to dissension of 
men in hard circumstances could scarcely have 
been hit upon. Anarchy and despotism are the 
inevitable alternatives under such a communistic 
arrangement, and each of these ensued in turn. 



James River Experiments. 



27 



III. 

The people sent over in the first years were for 
the most part utterly unfit. Of the first hundred, 
four were carpenters, there was a blacksmith, a 
tailor, a barber, a bricklayer, a mason, a drummer. 
There were fifty-five who ranked as gentlemen, 
and four were boys, while there were but twelve 
so-called laborers, including footmen, " that never 
did know what a day's work was." The company 
is described by one of its members as composed of 
poor gentlemen, tradesmen, serving men, libertines, 
and such like. " A hundred good workmen were 
better than a thousand such gallants," says Captain 
Smith. Of the moral character of the first emi- 
grants no better account is given. It was perhaps 
with these men in view that Bacon declared it " a 
shameful and unblessed thing " to settle a colony 
with " the scum of the people." 

IV. 

The ships sailed round by the Canaries, after 
the fashion of that time, doubling the distance to 
Virginia. They loitered in the West Indies to 
" refresh themselves " and quarrel, and they did 
not reach their destination until seedtime had 
well-nigh passed. They arrived on the 6th of 
^vMay, according to our style. Driven into Hamp- 
} ton Roads by a storm, they sailed up the wide 
outh of a river which they called the James, in 
honor of the king. At that season of the year the 



Chap. II. 



Character 
of the emi- 
grants. 

Smith's 
Gen. Hist., 
iii, c. i and 
c. xii. 

Advertise- 
ments for 
Planters of 
New Eng., 
P- S- 
Comp. 
Briefe De- 
claration in 
Pub. Rec. 
Off., Sains- 
bury i, 66 ; 
and New 
Life of Va. 



Essay on 
Planta- 
tions. 



The arri- 
val. 



28 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 
A. D. 1607. 



Percy, in 
Purchas, 
p. 1689. 



The first 
meetings 
with In- 
dians. 



Percy, in 
Purchas iv, 
pp. 1685, 
1686. 



banks must have shown masses of the white flow- 
ers of the dogwood, mingled with the pink-purple 
blossoms of the redbud against the dark primeval 
forest. Wherever they went ashore the newcom- 
ers found " all the ground bespread with many 
sweet and delicate flowers of divers colors and 
kinds." The sea-weary voyagers concluded that 
" heaven and earth had never agreed better to 
frame a place for man's habitation." 

They were like people in an enchanted land — 
all was so new and strange. On the first landing 
of a small party they had a taste of savage war- 
fare. " At night, when wee were going aboard, 
there came the savages creeping from the Hills 
like Beares, with their Bowes in their Mouthes, 
charged us very desperately, hurt Captain Gabrill 
Archer in both hands, and a Sayler in two places 
of the body very dangerous. After they had spent 
their arrowes, and felt the sharpness of our shot, 
they retired into the Woods with a great noise and 
so left us." 

But the newly arrived did not find all the Indi- 
ans hostile. The chief of the Rappahannocks came 
to welcome them, marching at the head of his 
train, piping on a reed flute, and clad in the fantas- 
tic dress of an Indian dandy. He wore a plate of 
copper on the shorn side of his head. The hair on 
the other side was wrapped about with deer's hair 
dyed red, " in the fashion of a rose." Two long 
feathers " like a pair of horns " were stuck in this 
rosy crown. His body was stained crimson, his 



James River Experiments. 



29 



face painted blue and besmeared with some glis- 
tering pigment which to the greedy eyes of the 
Ensrlish seemed to be silver ore. He wore a chain 
of beads, or wampum, about his neck, and his ears 
were " all behung with bracelets of pearls." There 
also depended from each ear a bird's claw set with 
copper — or " gold," adds the narrator, indulging a 
delightful dubiety. 

During the period of preliminary exploration 
every trait of savage life was eagerly observed by 
the English. The costume, the wigwams, and most 
of all the ingenious weapons of wood and stone, 
gave delight to the curiosity of the newcomers. 

V. 

The colonists chose for the site of their town 
what was then a malarial peninsula ; it has since 
become an island. The place was naturally de- 
fended by the river on all sides, except where a 
narrow stretch of sand made a bridge to the main. 
Its chief advantage in the eyes of the newcomers 
was that the deep water near the shore made it 
possible to moor the ships by merely tying them 
up to trees on the river bank. Here the settlers 
planted cotton and orange trees at once, and ex- 
perimental potatoes, melons, and pumpkins, but 
they postponed sowing grain until about the first 
of June in our reckoning. 

They took up their abode in hastily built cabins 
roofed with sedge or bark, and in ragged tents. 
The poorer sort were even fain to shelter them- 



Chap. II. 
A. D. 1607. 



Purchas i, 
686 and 
following. 



Founding 
of James- 
town, 



Note I. 



Relatyon 
of the Dis- 
covery of 
our River, 
Am. Antiq. 
Soc, iv, 61, 



The win- 
ter of 
misery. 



30 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 
A. D. 1607. 



Purchas, 
p. 1690. 



selves in mere burrows in the ground. Ill provided 
at the start, the greater part of their food was con- 
sumed by the seamen, who lingered to gather com- 
minuted mica for gold. In this hard environment, 
rent by faction, destitute of a competent leader and 
of any leader with competent authority, the won- 
der is that of this little company a single man sur- 
vived the winter. " There never were Englishmen 
left in any foreign country in such misery as we 
were in this new-discovered Virginia," says George 
Percy, brother to the Earl of Northumberland. A 
pint of worm-eaten barley or wheat was allowed 
for a day's ration. This was made into pottage 
and served out at the rate of one small ladleful at 
each meal. " Our drink was water, our lodgings 
castles in the air," says Smith. The misery was 
aggravated by a constant fear of attack from the 
Indians, who had been repulsed in an energetic 
assault made soon after the landing of the English. 
It was necessary for each man to watch every 
third night " lying on the cold, bare ground," and 
this exposure in a fever swamp, with the slender 
allowance of food of bad quality and the brackish 
river water, brought on swellings, dysenteries, and 
fevers. Sometimes there were not five men able 
to bear arms. " If there were any conscience in 
men," says Percy, " it would make their hearts 
bleed to hear the pitiful murmurings and outcries 
of our sick men without relief every day and night 
for the space of about six weeks." The living were 
hardl}' able to bury the dead, whose bodies were 



James River Experiments. 



31 



" trailed out like dogs." Half of the hundred colo- 
nists died, and the survivors were saved by the 
Indians, who, having got a taste of muskets and 
cannon in their early attack on Jamestown, now 
brought in supplies of game, corn, persimmons, and 
other food, to trade for the novel trinkets of the 
white men. 

VI. 

Peril and adversity bring the capable man to 
the front. The colony proceeded, by means of the 
technicalities habitually used in those days, to rid 
itself of its president, Wingfield, a man of good in- 
tentions but with no talents suitable to a place of 
such difficulty. Slowly, by one change and then 
another, the leadership fell into the hands of Cap- 
tain John Smith. During the voyage he had 
drawn upon himself the jealousy of the others, 
probably by his boastful and self-asserting habit of 
speech. When the list of councilors, till then kept 
secret, was opened at Jamestown and his name was 
found in it, he was promptly excluded by his asso- 
ciates. It was only on the intercession of the cler- 
gyman, Hunt, that he was at length admitted to 
the Council. 

His paradoxical character has been much mis- 
understood. Those who discredit the historical 
accuracy of Captain Smith's narratives consider 
his deeds of no value. It is the natural result and 
retribution of boasting that the real merit of the 
boaster is cast into the rubbish heap of contempt 



Chap. II. 



Emer- 
gence of 
Captain 
John 
Smith. 



32 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



His ro- 
mantic 
tenden- 
cies. 



His story 
of his own 
life. 



along with his false pretensions. On the other 
hand, those who appreciate Smith's services to the 
colony in its dire extremities believe that the his- 
torical authority of such a man must be valid. 

His character, double and paradoxical as it is, 
presents no insoluble enigma if we consider the 
forces of nature and of habit underlying its mani- 
festations. According to his own highly colored 
narrative, he had fed his fervid imagination on ro- 
mances of chivalry. The first natural result in. a 
youth so energetic as he, was that he should set 
out to emulate the imaginary heroes of whom he 
had read. It was equally a matter of course that 
a man of his vanity should exaggerate his own ad- 
ventures to the size of those that had excited his 
admiration. The same romantic turn of the imag- 
ination that sent him a-wandering after exploits 
in Flanders and in the wars with the Turks, in 
Barbary, and in Ireland, made his every adventure 
seem an exploit of heroic size. Such a man is valu- 
able when boldness and aggressive action are in 
request ; to relate facts where autobiography is in- 
volved he is little fitted. 

According to Smith's own narrative, he was 
robbed and shipwrecked at sea; he slew three in- 
fidel champions in single combat and cut off their 
heads, just for the amusement of the ladies; he 
was made captive by the Turks and escaped by 
slaying his master with a flail ; he encountered 
pirates ; in the plunder of a ship he secured by 
the grace of God a box of jewels ; and, to round 



Jmnes River Experwients. 



33 



off his story, he was beloved in romance fashion 
by a fair Turkish lady, one Tragabigzanda ; be- 
friended by a Russian lady, the good Calamata ; 
and, later, was snatched from the open jaws of death 
by the devotion of the lovely Princess Pocahontas, 
daughter of King Powhatan, of Virginia. What 
more could one ask ? Here are the elements of 
all the romances. But, to crown all, he emulated 
the misadventure of the prophet Jonah, and he even 
out-Jonahed Jonah. He got ashore by mere swim- 
ming without the aid of a whale, when cast over- 
board by Catholic pilgrims to appease a tempest. 
Never any other wanderer since the safe return of 
Ulysses passed through such a succession of mar- 
velous escapes as this young John Smith. His ac- 
cidents and achievements, even without exaggera- 
tion, were fairly notable, doubtless, but they are 
forever obscured by his vices of narration. 

By the time he was twenty-eight years old this 
knight-errant had pretty well exhausted Europe as 
a field for adventure. Soon after his return to his 
own land he found the navigator Gosnold agitating 
for a new colony in Virginia, the scene of Ralegh's 
failures. That being the most difficult and dan- 
gerous enterprise then in sight, nothing was more 
natural than that Smith should embark in it. From 
this time to the end of his life this really able 
man gave his best endeavors to the advancement 
of American colonization. In counsel he was ac- 
counted wise, and his advice was listened to with 
more than common deference in the assemblies of 

4 



Chap. II. 



Interest in 
coloniza- 
tion. 



His char- 
acter. 



34 



Rise of the First Colony 



Book I. 



Smith's 
explora- 
tion and 
trading. 



A. D. 1607, 
1608. 



Oxford 

Tract, 

passim. 

Gen. Hist. 
passim. 



the Virginia Company as long as the company 
lasted. In labor he was indefatigable, in emergen- 
cies he proved himself ready-witted and resource- 
ful. His recorded geographical observations are 
remarkably accurate considering his circumstances, 
and his understanding of Indian life shows his in- 
telligence. His writings on practical questions are 
terse, epigrammatic, and wise beyond the wisdom 
of his time. But where his own adventures or 
credit are involved he is hardly more trustworthy 
than Falstaff. His boasting is one of the many dif- 
ficulties a historian has to encounter in seeking to 
discover the truth regarding the events of an age 
much given to lying. 

VII. 

On Smith principally devolved the explorations 
for a passage to the Pacific and the conduct of the 
Indian trade. He was captured by the Indians in 
the swamps of the Chickahominy and carried from 
village to village in triumph. Contriving to secure 
his release from the head chief, Powhatan, he re- 
turned to Jamestown. Nothing could have suited 
better his bold genius and roving disposition than 
the life he thereafter led in Virginia. He sailed up 
and down the bays and estuaries, discovering and 
naming unknown islands, ascending great unknown 
rivers, cajoling or bullying the Indians, and re- 
turning to his hungry countr)^men at Jamestown 
laden with maize from the granaries of the savages. 
Smith and his companions coasted in all seasons 



James River Experiments. 



35 



and all weather in an open boat, exercising them- 
selves in morning psalm-singing and praying, in 
manoeuvring strange Indians by blustering^ or point- 
blank lying, and in trying to propagate the Chris- 
tian religion among the heathen — all in turn as 
occasion offered, like true Englishmen of the Jaco- 
bean time. 

Captain Smith's earlier accounts of these achieve- 
ments in Virginia seem to be nearer the truth than 
his later Generall Historie. As years rolled on his 
exploits gained in number and magnitude in his 
memory. The apocryphal story of his expound- 
ing the solar system by means of a pocket compass 
to savages whose idiom he had had no opportunity 
to learn is to be found only in his later writings. 
He is a prisoner but a month in the narrative of 
the Oxford Tract of 1612, which was written by 
his associates and published with his authority, but 
his captivity had grown to six or seven weeks in 
the Generall Historie of 1624. His prosaic release 
by Powhatan had developed into a romantic rescue 
by Pocahontas. Two or three hundred savages in 
the earlier account become four or five hundred 
in the later. Certain Poles assist him in the cap- 
ture of an Indian chief in the authorized narrative 
of Pots and Phettiplace. In the later story our 
hero performs this feat single-handed. ' A mere 
cipher attaches itself sometimes to the figure rep- 
resenting the number of his enemies, who by this 
simple feat of memory become ten times more re- 
doubtable than before. 



Chap. II. 



His narra- 
tive. 



36 



Rise of the First Colony 



Book I. 

His serv- 
ice to the 
colony. 

Oxf. Tract, 

P- 32- 

Gen. Hist., 
bk. iii, 
ch. V. 



Historic of 
Travaile 
into Vir- 
ginia, p. 
41. 



Smith 
over- 
thrown. 



But it does not matter greatly whether the 
"strangely grimmed and disguised" Indians seen 
by Smith at one place on the Potomac, who, ac- 
cording to the story, were shouting and yelling 
horribly, though in ambuscade, numbered three or 
four hundred as in one account, or three or four 
thousand as in his later story. To Captain Smith 
remains the credit of having been the one ener- 
getic and capable man in those first years — the 
man who wasted no time in a search for gold, but 
won from the Indians what was of infinitely greater 
value — the corn needed to preserve the lives of the 
colonists. In an open boat, with no instrument 
but a compass, he explored and mapped Chesa- 
peake Bay so well that his map was not wholly 
superseded for a hundred and forty years. Even 
Wingfield, who had reason to dislike Smith, recog- 
nizes the value of his services; and Strachey, who 
had every means of knowing, says that " there 
will not return from" Virginia "in hast any one 
who hath bene more industrious or who hath had 
(Captain Geo. Percie excepted) greater experience 
amongst them, however misconstruction maye tra- 
duce here at home." 

During the autumn of 1608 and the winter fol- 
lowing Captain Smith was sole ruler of James- 
town, all the other councilors having gone ; but 
the next spring there arrived five hundred new 
colonists inadequately provisioned, and under two 
of the old faction leaders who were Smith's mor- 
tal enemies. These were the visionary and turbu- 



James River Experiments. 



37 



lent Archer and his follower Ratcliffe. Smith got 
some of the newcomers to settle at Nansemond, 
and others took up their abode near the falls of 
the James River. After much turmoil Smith was 
disabled by an accident, and his enemies contrived 
to have him sent home charged, among other 
things, with having " incensed " the Indians to as- 
sault the insubordinate settlers under West near 
the falls, and with having designed to wed Poca- 
hontas in order to secure royal rights in Virginia 
as son-in-law to Powhatan. 

He afterward explored the New England coast 
with characteristic thoroughness and intelligence. 
What he published in his later years by way of 
advice on the subject of colony-planting is full of 
admirable good sense. With rare foresight he pre- 
dicted the coming importance of the colonial trade 
and the part to be played by the American fish- 
eries in promoting the greatness of England by 
" breeding mariners." He only of the men of his 
time suspected the imperial size and future great- 
ness of North America. He urged that the colo- 
nies should not annoy " with large pilotage and 
such like dues " those who came to trade in their 
ports. Low customs, he says, enrich a people. 
This is a strange doctrine in an age when foreign 
trade seemed almost an evil, and false conceptions 
of economic principles were nearly universal. 
Captain Smith's words are often pregnant with a 
wit whose pungency is delightful. In mental and 
physical hardihood, and in what may be called 



Chap. II. 
A. D. i6og. 

Note 2. 



His later 
years. 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note 3. 



The fam- 
ine of 
iBog-'io. 



Note 4. 



A. D. 1609, 
1610. 



shiftiness, as well as in proneness to exaggeration 
and in boastfulness, he was in some sense a typical 
American pioneer— a forerunner of the daring and 
ready-witted men who have subdued a savage 
continent. 

VIII. 

Disaster of some sort could hardly have been 
avoided had Captain Smith been allowed to stay, 
but after his departure ruin came swiftly, and there 
was no hand strong enough to stay it. The un- 
checked hostility of the savages drove the outset- 
tiers from Nansemond and the falls of the James. 
The Indians found exercise for their devilish in- 
genuity in torturing those who fell into their hands 
alive, and outraging the dead. The brave but un- 
wise Percy added fuel to their consuming fury 
by visiting their shrine and desecrating the tombs 
of their chiefs. There was now no one who could 
carry on the difficult Indian trade. Ratcliffe, who 
had conspired to send Smith back to England, fell 
into an ambuscade while emulating Captain Smith's 
example in trading with Powhatan. He was tor- 
tured to death by the Indian women, and only 
fifteen of his fifty men got back to Jamestown. 
The brood hogs of the colony were all eaten, the 
dogs came next, and then the horses, which were 
to have stocked Virginia, were consumed to their 
very hides. Rats, mice, and adders were relished 
when they were to be had, and fungi of various 
sorts were eaten with whatever else " would fill 



James River Experiments, 



39 



either mouth or belly." An Indian slain in an 
assault on the stockade was dug- up after he had 
been three days buried, and eaten " by the poorer 
sort," their consuming hunger not being embar- 
rassed by the restraints of gentility. From this 
horrible expedient it was but one step to the dig- 
ging up of their own dead for food. Famine- 
crazed men even dogged the steps of those of their 
comrades who were not quite wasted, threatening 
to kill and devour them. Among these despair- 
ing and shiftless men there was but one man of 
resources. Daniel Tucker — let his later sins as 
tyrant of Bermuda be forgiven — bethought himself 
to build a boat to catch fish in the river, and this 
small relief " did keep us from killing one another 
to eat," says Percy. He seems to have been the 
only man who bethought himself to do anything. 
One man, in the ferocity engendered by famine, 
slew his own wife and salted what he did not eat 
at once of her flesh, but he was put to death at 
the stake for this crime. Some, braving the sav- 
ages, sought food in the woods and died while 
seeking it, and were eaten by those who found 
them dead. Others, in sheer desperation, threw 
themselves on the tender mercies of the Indians 
and were slain. To physical were added spiritual 
torments. One despairing wretch threw his Bible 
into the fire, crying out in the market place that 
there was no God in heaven. Percy adds, with 
grim theological satisfaction characteristic of the 
time, that he was killed by the Indians in the very 



Chap. II. 
A. D. 1610. 



Note 5. 



40 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I, 



Tragicall 
Relation, 
1623. 

Briefe Dec- 
laration, 
1624, both 
in British 
Pub. Rec- 
ord Office. 
Percy's 
Trewe Re- 
lacy on, 
MS., Pet- 
worth 
House. 



The arri- 
val of 
Gates and 
Somers, 
1610. 



A True 
Declara- 
tion of the 
Estate of 
the Colony 
of Virginia, 
i6io, p. 23. 



market place where he had blasphemed in his 
agony. The depopulated houses, and even the 
palisades so necessary for protection, were burned 
for firewood by the enfeebled people, and James- 
town came presently to look like the slumbering 
ruins of some ancient fortification. Fortunately, 
the Indians did not think it worth while to lose 
any more of their men in attacking the desperate 
remainder. It seemed inevitable that all who were 
shut up in the Jamestown peninsula should perish 
of hunger in a very few days. Of the nearly five 
hundred colonists in Virginia in the autumn of 
1609, there were but sixty famine-smitten wretches 
alive in the following June, and hardly one of 
these could have survived had help been delayed 
a few days longer. 

IX. 

Relief came to the little remnant from a quarter 
whence it was least expected. The emigrants of 
the preceding year had been sent out under the 
authority of Sir Thomas Gates and Sir George 
Somers. The two leaders were jealous of each 
other, and for fear either should gain advantage by 
prior arrival they embarked in the same ship. 
This ship became separated from the rest of the 
fleet and went ashore on the Bermudas, then unin- 
habited, and " accounted as an inchaunted pile of 
rockes and a desert inhabitation for Divels," in the 
words of a writer of the time; "but all the fairies 
of the rocks were but flocks of birds, and all the 



James River Experi7ne7its. 



41 



Divels that haunted the woods were but herds of 
swine." Here old Sir George Somers, a veteran 
seaman, constructed two little cedar vessels, and 
provisioning them for the voyage with what the 
islands afforded — live turtles, and the flesh of wild 
hogs and waterfowl salted — the company set sail 
for Virginia in the spring of 1610, arriving barely 
in time to save the colony from extinction. Find- 
ing that their provisions would not last more than 
two or three weeks, they abandoned the wreck of 
Jamestown, crowding all the people into four pin- 
naces, including the two improvised cedar boats 
built on the Bermudas. They sailed down the 
river in the desperate hope of surviving until they 
could reach Newfoundland and get supplies from 
fishing vessels. The four little craft were turned 
back on encountering Lord De la Warr, the new 
governor, ascending the James to take charge of 
the colony. The meeting with De la Warr was 
bitterly regretted by the old settlers, who pre- 
ferred the desperate chance of a voyage in pin- 
naces on a shipless sea with but a fortnight's pro- 
vision to facing again the horrors of life at 
Jamestown. 

With all the formalities thought necessary at 
that time, De la Warr took possession of James- 
town, now become a forlorn ruin full of dead men's 
bones. Gates was sent to England for a new stock 
of cattle, while the brave old Sir George Somers 
once more embarked for the Bermudas in the Pa- 
tience, the little cedar pinnace which he had built 



Chap. II. 



Note 6. 



De la 

Warr's ar- 
rival, 1610. 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 

Smith's 
Oxford 
Tract, so 
called. 



Note 7. 



De la 
Warr's 
govern- 
ment, 1610. 

Note S. 



British Mu- 
seum, MS. 

21.993. 
ff. 174, 178. 
Instr. to 
Gates and 
Dela 
Warr. 



Gold-hunt- 
ing. 



wholly of the wood of that island without a parti- 
cle of iron except one bolt in the keel. In this boat 
he sailed up and down until he found again "the 
still ve-xed Bei'moothes," where he hoped to secure 
provisions. He died in the islands. Argall was 
also sent to the Bermudas, but missed them, and 
went north to the fishing- banks in search of food. 

Jamestown was cleansed, and with a piety char- 
acteristic of that age the deserted little church was 
enlarged and reoccupied and daily decorated with 
Virginia wild flowers. All the bitter experience of 
the first three years had not taught the true meth- 
od of settling a new country. The colony was still 
but a camp of men without families, and the old 
common stock system was retained. To escape 
from the anarchy which resulted from a system 
that sank the interest of the individual in that of 
the community, it had been needful to arm De la 
Warr with the sharp sword of martial law. Some 
of the instructions given him were unwise, some 
impossible of execution. To convert the Indians 
out of hand, as he w^as told to do, by shutting up 
their medicine men or sending them to England to 
be Christianized by the methods then in use, did 
not seem a task easy of accomplishment, for In- 
dian priests are not to be caught in time of war. 
But De la Warr undertook another part of his in- 
structions. A hundred men under two captains 
were sent on a wild-goose chase up the James 
River to find gold or silver in the mountains, 
whither the phantom of mines had now betaken 



James River Experiments. 



43 



itself. This plan originated with the London man- 
agers of Virginia affairs, and men had been sent 
with De la Warr who were supposed to be skill- 
ful in " finding out mines." But being especially 
unskillful in dealing with the Indians, they were 
tempted ashore by savages, who offered them food 
and slew them " while the meate was in theire 
mouthes." The expedition thereupon turned back 
at a point about forty miles above the present site 
of Richmond. 

A new town was begun at the falls, in the fond 
belief that two mines were near, and De la Warr 
took up his residence there. Jamestown, drawing 
its water from a shallow and probably polluted 
well, became the seat of a fresh epidemic. In the 
month of March following his arrival the governor 
fled from the colony to save his own life, leaving 
Virginia more than ever discredited. 

X. 

As the hope of immediate profit from Virginia 
died away, the colony would have been abandoned 
if there had not arisen in its favor a patriotic en- 
thusiasm which gave it a second lease of life. 
Many of the great noblemen were deeply engaged 
in this new agitation in favor of the unlucky col- 
ony, and none more deeply, perhaps, than Prince 
Henry, the heir apparent. At Henry's request. 
Sir Thomas Dale, an officer who had been em- 
ployed about the prince's person, and who with 
other English officers was now in the service of 



Chap. II. 



Brief e Dec- 
laration, 
MS., Pub. 
Rec. Off. 



Flight cf 
De la 
Warr. 



Sir 

Thomas 
Dale, 1611. 



Docs. Rel. 
to Col. 
Hist. N.Y., 
i, pp. I, 2, 
3. 9. 10, 
16-21. 



44 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



The heavy 
hand of 
Dale, 1611- 

i6i5. 



A Briefe 
Declara- 
tion of the 
Plantation 
of Virginia, 
1624, MS., 
Pub. Rec. 
Off. 



Brit. Mu- 
seum, MS., 
21.993, f. 
174. 



the Netherlands, was granted leave of absence to 
go to Virginia. Since the colony was a check to 
Spain, the Netherlands were supposed to have an 
indirect interest in the enterprise and were per- 
suaded to continue Captain Dale's pay. De la 
Warr, who remained in England, was nominally 
governor ; Gates, when present in Virginia, was 
the ranking officer ; but for five years Dale ap- 
pears to have been the ruling spirit in the colony. 

To induce him to go, Dale had been deceived 
regarding the condition of the plantation, as had 
been everybody else that had gone to Jamestown 
after the first ships sailed. The vice-admiral, New- 
port, was the principal reporter of Virginia affairs 
in England and the principal agent of the company 
in this deception. Dale's rough temper was al- 
ready well known. It was for this, no doubt, that 
he had been chosen to do a rude piece of work. 
On his arrival he saw the desperate state of the 
undertaking. He pulled Vice-Admiral Newport's 
beard and threatened him with the gallows, de- 
manding "whether it weare meant that people 
heere in Virginia shoulde feed uppon trees." 

Under the inefficient government of George 
Percy, who had again been placed in charge, the 
seedtime of 161 1 was allowed to pass without the 
planting of corn. The Jamestown people were 
found by Dale "at their daily and usual work 
bowling in the streets." But the days of unthrifty 
idleness were at an end. " The libertyes, ffranchises, 
and immunityes of free denizens and natural-born 



Javics River Expcriinc7its. 



45 



subjects of any our other dominions " promised to 
the colonists, were also at an end from the moment 
of the arrival of this sharp-set soldier and discipli- 
narian. Dale's pitiless use of martial law turned 
Virginia not exactly into a military camp, but 
rather into a penal settlement where men suffered 
for the crime of emigration. The men taken to 
Virginia in Dale's own company were hardly fit for 
anything else, and were so " diseased and crazed 
in their bodies " that at one time not more than 
sixty out of three hundred were capable of labor. 
The food sent with Sir Thomas Dale by the cor- 
rupt contractors was " of such qualitie as hoggs re- 
fused to eat." Sir Thomas Gates afterward made 
oath to its badness before the Chief Justice in 
London. 

XI. 

Dale regarded himself as an agent of the com- 
pany. His aim was by hook or crook to make the 
hitherto unprofitable colony pay dividends to the 
shareholders, who were his employers. His rela- 
tion to the emigrants was that of a taskmaster ; one 
might, perhaps, more fitly call him a slave-driver. 
Instead of seeking to render the colony self-sup- 
porting by clearing corn ground, he gave his first 
attention to lading vessels with sassafras root, then 
much prized as a medicine, and cedar timber, val- 
ued especially for its odor. 

During a part of Dale's time eight or nine 
ounces of meal and half a pint of peas was the 



Chap. II. 



Briefe Dec- 
laration. 



The years 
of slavery. 



46 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I, 

Briefe Dec- 
laration. 
Percy to 
Northum- 
berland, 
Hist. MS., 
Commis- 
sion, 

Rept., iii, 
53. 54. 



Obsen'a- 
tions and 
Travel 
from Lon- 
don to 
Hamburgh, 
P- 13- 



daily ration. In their declaration, made some years 
afterward, the surviving colonists aver that both 
the meal and the peas were " moldy, rotten, full of 
cobwebs and maggots, loathsome to man and unfit 
for beasts." Better men than these might have 
been driven to mutiny by the enforced toil and 
bad food. And mutin}^ and desertion were usually 
but other names for suicide under the rule of the 
pitiless high marshal. Some fled to the w'oods, 
hoping to reach a mythical Spanish settlement be- 
lieved to be not very far away. Dale set the Indi- 
ans on them, and they were brought back to be 
burned at the stake. Others, who in desperation 
or deadl}' homesickness resolved to venture their 
lives in a barge and a shallop " for their native 
country," suffered in various ways for their temer- 
ity. Death by shooting or hanging was clemency. 
One offender was put to death by the awful torture 
of breaking on the wheel, a penalty that Dale may 
have learned during his stay on the Continent. 
Taylor, the water poet, has left us the sickening 
details of such an execution in Germany in i6i6. 
One need not waste any sympathy on those who 
were hanged for stealing to satisfy hunger ; death 
is more merciful than life to men in such a case. 
But one poor rogue, who thought to better his ra- 
tions by filching two or three pints of oatmeal, had 
a bodkin run through his tongue and was chained 
to a tree until he perished of hunger. Though 
these things were twice attested by the best men 
in the colony, one prefers to make some allow^ance 



James River Experiments. 



A7 



for their passionate resentment, and to hope that 
some of the horrors related are exaggerated. It is 
hard to believe, for example, that men unable to 
work were denied food, and left to creep away 
into the wretched burrows in the ground used for 
shelter, there to die unregarded in the general 
misery. 

In 1612 a company of ten men sent out to catch 
fish braved the perils of the ocean in a Httle bark 
and got back to England. It was the only escape 
from Dale's tyranny, pitiless and infernal. "Aban- 
don every hope who enter here " was almost as 
appropriate to the mouth of the James River as to 
the gate of Dante's hell. All letters of complaint 
sent to England were intercepted, and all efforts 
of friends of the colonists in England to succor or 
rescue them were thwarted by the company in 
London. The king's pass to one of the colonists 
authorizing him to leave Virginia was sent to him 
by his friends closely made up in a garter, to avoid 
the vigilance of Sir Thomas Dale. 

Dale's administration was strongest on its mili- 
tary side. There was no danger that the Indians 
would reduce the colony to any straits while he 
was in charge. He gave his first attention to forti- 
fication, and he even begged for two thousand con- 
victs out of English jails to form a line of posts 
from Hampton to a point a hundred miles above 
Jamestown. He sent Argall all the way to JNIount 
Desert to plunder a Jesuit settlement and make 
prize of a French ship — an undertaking congenial 



Chap. II. 



Briefe Dec- 
laration. 



Dale's 
services. 



48 



Rise of tlie First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note 9. 



Dale'B 
return. 



to Dale's military temper and tiie Viking tastes of 
Argall. As his experience increased, Dale came to 
understand that other than military measures were 
needed to found a colon}^ though he never more 
than half comprehended the elements of the prob- 
lem. In his later time he cleared more corn 
ground, and he could boast at his departure that 
Virginia contained six horses, a hundred and fort}^- 
nine neat cattle, two hundred and sixteen goats, 
and hogs without number. Dale set off a private 
garden of three acres of land to each of the old 
planters, on the condition that the}' should provide 
food for themselves while still giving nearly all of 
their time to the service of the common stock. 
Even this slave's-patch of private interest given 
to only a fraction of the colonists put some life 
into Virginia; but two thirds of the people were 
retained in the old intolerable bondage, and not 
even the most favored secured personal ownership 
of land. Dale's administration was remembered 
as " the five years of slavery." 



XII. 

The rough-handed soldier from the Low Coun- 
tries had indeed brought the Virginia chaos into 
order, but it was an order almost as deadly as the 
preceding anarchy. Dale confessed that the gov- 
ernment of Virginia was " the hardest task he had 
ever undertaken," and he got himself out of it after 
five years by making a theatrical return to England 



James River Experiments. 



49 



in 1616 with a train of Indians, including the " Prin- 
cess" Pocahontas, converted, baptized with a Chris- 
tian name as Rebecca, and wedded to an English- 
man. He added glowing reports of the country, 
and proved all by exhibiting "at least sixteen sev- 
eral sorts of staple commodities to be raised in this 
plantation." For greater effect, samples of twelve 
of these products of the colony were sold by pub- 
lic auction in the open court of the company. 
Though Dale could show many commodities, some 
of which have never flourished in Virginia since 
his time, he left behind him not an established com- 
munity, but a mere camp of unhappy men retained 
in the country by the sheer impossibility of getting 
away. After nine years of suffering, Virginia con- 
sisted of some three hundred and twenty-six men, 
twenty-five women and children, and graves out- 
numbering many times over all the living souls. 

Three things had been discovered in Dale's 
time that were of importance to the colony. Dale 
had by personal experiment learned the two fish- 
ing seasons in the James River. The colonists had 
begun the profitable cultivation of tobacco, and 
the economic success of the colony was thereby 
assured. Lastly, even Dale's small experiment with 
private interest rendered the apportionment of the 
land and the establishment of private ownership 
certain to come in time. As early as 1614 it was 
^estimated that three men working for themselves 
raised more corn than ten times as many when the 
labor was for the public stock. 



Chap. II. 
Note 10. 



Note II. 



Note 12. 



so 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Argall's 
govern- 
ment. 



XIII. 

Captain Argall, who succeeded Sir Thomas 
Dale, was a bold and notable mariner. He had 
built the first Virginia vessel ; he had traded with 
the Indians for corn with as much enterprise and 
address as Captain Smith had shown ; he had in a 
small ship called the Dainty made the first experi- 
mental voyage to James River by the westward 
route, avoiding the long circuit by the Canaries 
and West Indies. It had been his fortune to be 
the first Englishman to see the American bison, 
which he found near the Potomac. He it was who 
by a shrewd trick had captured Pocahontas and 
held her as hostage ; and he drove the French out 
of Maine, despoiling their settlement at Mount 
Desert. To a mastery of all the arts that make the 
skillful navigator he added the courteous polite- 
ness of a man of the city and the unfaltering 
rapacity of a pirate. As governor, he robbed the 
company with one hand and the hapless colonists 
with the other. While using the ships and men of 
the colony to carry on the Indian trade, he turned 
all the profits of it into his own wallet. The breed- 
ing animals of the colony accumulated by Dale he 
sold, and made no account of the proceeds. There 
was hardly anj^hing portable or salable in Vir- 
ginia that he did not purloin. He even plundered 
the property of Lady De la Warr, the widow of 
his predecessor. He boldly fitted out a ship be- 
longing to Lord Rich, and sent an expedition of 



James River Experiments. 



51 



sheer piracy to the West Indies under an old letter 
of marque from the Duke of Savoy. When advices 
from England warned Argall that his downfall was 
imminent, he forthwith redoubled his felonious 
diligence. His chief partner in England was Lord 
Rich, who became the second Earl of Warwick in 
1619, about the time of Argall's return, and who is 
known to history in his later character as a great 
Puritan nobleman, who served God while he con- 
trived to better his estate with both hands by such 
means as troublous times put within his reach. 
He was not content with small pickings. Rich ap- 
pears to have aimed at nothing less tWan wrecking 
the company and securing the land and govern- 
ment of Virginia. The first step toward this was 
to get a charter for a private or proprietary plan- 
tation within Virginia which should be exempt 
from all authority of the company and the colony. 
This independent government was to serve as a 
refuge from prosecutions for Argall and other pi- 
ratical agents, and at last to possess itself of the 
wreck and remainder of Virginia. The second 
step in this intrigue was one that could have 
availed nothing in any time less respectful to shad- 
owy technicalities and less prone to legal chicanery 
than that of James I. As we have seen, jealousy 
was excited in Virginia by the possibility of Cap- 
tain Smith's wedding Pocahontas and setting up a 
claim to authority based on her inheritance from 
Powhatan. A tradition lingered in Virginia a 
hundred years later that King James questioned 



Chap. II. 



Lord 
Rich's in- 
trigue. 



Note 13. 



Stith, 142, 



52 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



The Com- 
panie's 
root of 
difference. 
MS. Rec. 
Va. Co., 
May 7, 
1623. 

MS. Rec. 
Va. Co., 

passim. 



Rolfe's right to intermarry with a foreign princess 
without the consent of his sovereign. If this had 
any foundation, it grew out of the value of a pre- 
text in a time of technicahty and intrigue. There 
may have been already a scheme to trade upon 
the hereditary right of Powhatan's daughter. Po- 
cahontas died in England, leaving an infant son. 
Argall, on his arrival, hastened to notify the com- 
pany that Opechankano, the brother and successor 
of Powhatan, had resolved not to sell any more 
land, but to reserve it for the son of Pocahontas 
when he should be grown. The company charged 
that this was a ruse to serve the ends which Argall, 
Rich, and others had in view. The larger plan 
miscarried, but Argall found his prey so tempting 
that he lingered longer than was safe, and got away 
in the nick of time by the aid of Lord Rich, who 
had stood guard like a burglar's pal, and who con- 
trived to delay the ship carrying out the new 
governor until a small swift-sailing vessel could be 
sent to fetch away Argall and his varied booty of 
public and private plunder. In that day justice 
often went by favor, and Argall consigned his 
spoils to hands so powerful that the Virginia Com- 
pany, stripped bare by his treacherous villainy, 
could never recover any of its lost property. The 
embittered colonists had the bootless satisfaction of 
sending over after the runaway governor twenty- 
four bundles of accusatory depositions. 



James River Experiments. 



53 



XIV. 

From the first nobody reaped an)^ profit from 
investments made in the new colony except the 
clique of merchants who had been allowed to sell 
wretched supplies for the distant settlers at ruin- 
ous rates. Rich and those interested with him had 
abundantly reimbursed themselves for all outlays 
on their part. The Virginia Company, swindled by 
commercial peculators at home, robbed by a pirate 
governor in America, and embarrassed by Spanish 
intrigues at the English court, had also been de- 
prived of the lotteries, large and small, which had 
supplied money for sending eight hundred emi- 
grants to Virginia. The lottery, which had fallen 
into great disrepute and had suffered " many foul 
aspersions," was abolished in compliance with a 
public sentiment. The company was tottering 
swiftly to a fall ; vultures like Warwick were wait- 
ing longingly for its death. 

But there set in once more a widespread patri- 
otic movement in its behalf. Such movements 
were characteristic of that vital age when love of 
country was fast coming to count for more as a 
motive to action than loyalty to the person of a 
prince. " Divers lords, knights, gentlemen, and 
citizens, grieved to see this great action fall to 
nothing," came to its rescue with one final effort 
which resulted after some years in putting the en- 
terprise well be3"ond the danger of failure. They 
formed auxiliary societies within the Virginia Com- 



Chap. II. 



Fall of the 
lottery. 



Note 14. 



Revival of 

interest, 

1618. 



54 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



The Great 

Charter, 

i6iS. 



Pub. Rec. 
Off. Col. 
Papers, 
iii, 40. 
Disc, of the 
Old Va. 
Co. 



pany, after the custom of corporations in that day. 
Each of these undertook to plant a settlement or 
" hundred." In one year the population rose from 
less than four hundred to about a thousand. The 
newly active element infused a more liberal spirit 
into the company, and set about correcting the 
abuses in its management. 



XV. 

The movement of 1618 was retarded by the dis- 
grace into which the colony had fallen. An un- 
broken series of misfortunes and disappointments, 
the bad conduct of the company's affairs, the ill 
fame of Dale's remorseless tyranny, and the fresh 
Argall scandal, had made Virginia odious. One 
convict to whom the alternative was proposed, 
chose hanging in preference to transportation to 
Virginia. It was needful that something should be 
done to restore credit. The men who took the 
lead in the patriotic movement of 161 8 on behalf of 
Virginia were mainly liberal statesmen — that Earl 
of Southampton who is known as the friend of 
Shakespeare; Sir Edwin Sandys, one of the great- 
est men of a great age, whose brave support of 
popular liberty had lost him the favor of the king ; 
Sir John Danvers, and others. The records before 
the election of Sandys in 16 19 were probably de- 
stroyed to conceal the guilt of the managers. We 
can only conjecture that the rising influence of the 
men who were able a few months later to over- 



James River Experiments. 



55 



throw the ruling party had much to do with the 
most notable change that took place in the con- 
duct of affairs in the Virginia Company at this 
time. On the 13th of November, 161 8 — memora- 
ble but neglected and forgotten date — the Virginia 
Company, acting within the powers conferred on 
it by its charter, granted to the residents in Vir- 
ginia a document styled a " Great Charter or Com- 
missions of Priviledges, Orders, and Lawes." No 
copy of this instrument now exists, but some of its 
provisions have been preserved. It established a 
legislative body, to consist of councilors of estate 
and of representatives or burgesses chosen by the 
several " plantations " or hundreds, and it limited 
the power of the governor. This charter was the 
starting point of constitutional government in the 
New World. It contained in embryo the Ameri- 
can system of an executive power lodged mainly 
in one person, and a Legislature of two houses. 
One might without much exaggeration call this 
paper a sort of Magna Charta of America, and it 
was a long and probably a deliberate step toward 
popular government. If the results that have fol- 
lowed it be considered, it can hardly be accounted 
second in importance to any other state paper of 
the seventeenth century. 



XVI. 

Not only did this admirable charter establish a 
representative form of government and do away 



Chap. II, 



Note 15. 



Division 
of land. 



56 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 
Note 16. 



Aspinwall 
Papers, p. 
14, note. 



True Dec- 
laration, p. 
25. 



The good 
news in 
Virginia. 



Note 17. 



Tragicall 
Relation, 
1623. 



with martial law, but it fairly launched the Virgin- 
ians on the current of freedom and advancement 
by authorizing a liberal division of land to all 
those who had arrived before the departure of Sir 
Thomas Dale. The oldest land titles in Virginia 
are deduced from the authority of the Great Char- 
ter of 161 8. Communism, pernicious everywhere, 
is at its worst in an infant settlement. " Every 
man sharked for his own bootie," says a writer 
on Virginia in 1609, " but was altogether careless 
of the succeeding penurie." The distribution of 
land abolished the common stock system of labor, 
and opened a pathway to the ambition of the 
diligent. 

Tidings of the great change wrought in their 
condition and prospects by the new charter reached 
the dwellers on the James River in the spring of 
1619, and the colonists were "ravished with so 
much joy " that they felt themselves " now fully 
satisfied for their long labors and as happy men as 
there were in the world." They valued their lib- 
erties as no man can who has not known the bitter- 
ness of bondage, and in 1623, when they had reason 
to fear the re-establishment of the old tyranny, the 
Virginia Assembly petitioned the king in these 
strong words : " Rather than be reduced to live 
under the like government, we desire his Majesty 
that commissioners may be sent over to hang us." 
We have here, perhaps, the very first of the many 
protests of colonial Legislatures against oppres- 
sion from Eng-land. 



James River Experiments. 



57 



XVII. 

In 1618, before the adoption of the charter, it 
was concluded, in the quaint phrase of the time, 
"that a plantation can never flourish till families be 
planted and the respects of Wives and Children fix 
the people on the soyle," or, in simpler words, that 
a colony of bachelors can hardly found a state. 
The first ship laden with home-makers carried over 
ninety maids, and the company thought it neces- 
sary to promise special rewards to the men who 
should marry these young women. If the maids 
were as certified, " young, handsome, and well rec- 
ommended," they needed no such dowry in a land 
that had hardly a woman in it. Young or old, 
handsome or homely, the maids did not prove a 
drug. Shipload after shipload of them were eager- 
ly bought by the planters, who had to pay a round 
sum in the high-priced tobacco of that early time 
to defray the cost of transporting these wives. 
Besides having to pay for his wife, the planter 
could have her only on the condition of winning 
her consent ; and the eager courtship that ensued 
on the arrival of a shipload of maids must have 
been one of the most amusing scenes in the set- 
tlement of America. Suitors far outnumbered the 
women, and the latter had things pretty much their 
own way. The first cargo of this interesting mer- 
chandise was landed in 1619, but as late as 1624 
the women were probably in danger of setting the 
colonists by the ears, for the governor felt obliged 



Chap. II. 



The send- 
ing of 
wives to 
Virginia. 



Note 18. 



58 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note 19. 



The strug- 
gle ended, 
1624. 



•0 



to issue a proclamation threatening fine or whip- 
ping for the offense of betrothal to more than one 
person at a time. In 1632, thirteen years after the 
first shipment, we find the colony still being re- 
plenished with women sent in the same fashion. 
In that year, two, whose behavior during the voy- 
age had been disgraceful, were sent back as unfit 
to be mothers of Virginians. The precaution could 
not have been of much practical use, but it indi- 
cates the early growth of a wholesome local pride. 
When there were house mothers in the cabins, and 
children born in the country, the settlers no longer 
dreamed of returning to England ; and there was 
soon a young generation that knew no other skies 
than those that spanned the rivers, fields, and vast 
primeval forests of their native Virginia, which 
now for the first time became a home. 



XVIII. 

It is not the Virginia colony alone that we have 
seen in the crucible. The fate of English coloniza- 
tion was no doubt settled by the experiments made 
during the first years on the James River, and the 
story told in this chapter is but the overture to the 
whole history of life in the United States. In our 
colonizing age a settlement might be made in the 
heart of Africa with a far smaller loss of life than 
was incurred in the first sixteen years in Virginia. 
From 1607 to 1623 there were landed in Virginia 
more than six thousand people. The number that 



James River Experijnents. 



59 



returned to England was inconsiderable, but in the 
year 1624, when the colony passed under a ro3'al 
government, there remained alive in the colony 
only twelve hundred and seventy-five. Of those 
who came in these early years four fifths perished. 
A part of this loss was due to radically wrong con- 
ceptions of the nature, end, and proper methods of 
colonization, a part to corrupt and incompetent 
management in the London Company. The bad 
character of many of the earliest emigrants was 
one cause of difiiculty. The writers of the time 
probably exaggerated this evil in order to excuse 
the severity of the government and the miseries 
into which the settlers fell. But the loss of many 
of the early comers must be accounted a distinct 
gain to Virginia. Unfitted for their environment, 
they were doomed to extinction by that pitiless 
law which works ever to abolish from the earth 
the improvident, the idle, and the vicious. 



Elucidations. 

In 1889, when I visited Jamestown, there was no apparent 
trace of Sandy Beach which had connected the island with the 
mainland. This bit of sand, in the antique phrase of one of the 
early colonists, was " no broader than a man may well quaite a 
tileshard." Strachey, in Purchas, p. 1752. Jamestown is now 
a farm ; the ruins of the church and many of the tombs in the 
eighteenth-century churchyard remain ; but the upper end of the 
island is wearing away, and I picked out of the crumbling sand, 
far from the later burying place, human bones of earlier burials, 
possibly of the victims of the famines and epidemics. The walls 
of the magazine had been exposed by erosion. I brought away 



Chap. II. 



Note I, 
page 29. 



6o 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note 2, 
page 37- 



wrought nails, bits of glass grown iridescent from long burial, 
and an exploded bombshell of so small a caliber as to mark 
its antiquity. By the aid of a negro youth living on the farm 
I found the hearth bricks turned up in various places by the 
plow, and the arrangement, or rather lack of arrangement, of 
the town could thus be made out. My guide volunteered the in- 
formation that Jamestown was " the first place discovered after 
the Flood." Some drawings made at the time were reproduced 
with an article on Nathaniel Bacon in the Century Magazine for 
July, 1890. 

Whether Smith was injured by gunpowder and required treat- 
ment, as he asserts, or was sent home under charges, has been 
matter of dispute. Both accounts are correct, as is shown by 
the testimony of an important manuscript at Petworth House, in 
Surrey, which I was allowed to examine by the courtesy of Lord 
Leconsfield. It is from the pen of George Percy, a brother of 
the Earl of Northumberland, who was chosen to succeed Smith 
on his departure from the colony. It is not the narrative from 
which Purchas makes extracts, but a sequel to it. The title is 
" A Trewe Relacyon of the pceedinge and Ocvrrentes of mo- 
menta wch have hapned in Virginia from the Tyme Sr Thomas 
Gates was shipwrackde vpon the Bermudes Ano. 1609 vntill my 
depture ovtt of the country wch was in Ano Dni 1612." It is a 
quarto of forty-one pages. Percy was a man of courage, but 
his own narrative in this little book shows that he had no quali- 
fication for the office of governor except the rank of his family. 
His ill health is made an excuse for his inefficiency, but Dale's 
letter of May 25, 161 1, shows that even the horrible events of 
Percy's first government had not taught him to plant corn when 
again left in charge. Percy naturally resents Smith's boast- 
fulness, and bluntly accuses him of laying claim to credit that 
was not his. The charge that Smith, unable to control the un- 
ruly settlers at the Falls under West, advised the Indians to at- 
tack them, is supported by Percy ; and a very different charge, 
that he stirred up the Indians to assassinate West himself, ap- 
pears at a later time in Spelman's Relation, a tract that bears 
abundant internal evidence of the writer's mental inability to 
speak the truth. Percy himself relates that the Indians were 
already hostile to West's party, and that they had wounded and 
killed some of West's men in resentment of their wanton out- 
rages. See also the account in the Oxford Tract, with the sig- 



James River Experhnents. 



6i 



natures of Pots and Phettiplace, for Smith's version of the affair. 
" Bloody-niincledness " seems not to have been a trait of Smith. 
But the exigency was a terrible one, for death by starvation was 
ah^eady impending, and only the restoration of discipline at any 
cost could have saved the colony from the horrible fate it met. 
Such a course would not have done much violence to the notions 
of the time, and would have found precedents in the various plots 
against the lives of Smith, Wingfield, and others in the colony. 
It is quite probable, however, that there is no truth in the story. 
The violent hatred of the factions will account for the suspicion. 

Captain Smith's True Relation was sent from Virginia and 
was printed in London in 1608. In 161 2 he published what is 
commonly referred to as the O.xford Tract. Its proper title is 
very long. The first part of it is as follows : " Map of Virginia, 
with a description of the Covntry, the Commodities, People, Gov- 
ernment, and Religion. Written by Captain Smyth, sometime 
Governor of the Covntry. And wherevnto is annexed the pro- 
ceedings of those colonies since their first departure from Eng- 
land," etc. The second part of the book professes to be taken 
from the writings of eight of the colonists, whose names are given, 
and to have been edited by W. S. — that is, the Reverend Dr. 
Symonds. The Generall Historic was first proposed in a well- 
considered and rather elegant speech by Captain Smith at a meet- 
ing of the Virginia Company, April 12, 162 1, while the new patent 
which was to be submitted to Parliament was under discussion. 
He suggested the writing of a history to preserve the memory of 
the worthies of Virginia, dead and living, and gave it as his 
opinion that no Spanish settlement of the same age afforded mat- 
ter more interesting. " Which worthy speech," says the record, 
" had of the whole court a very great applause as spoken freely 
to a speciall purpose, and therefore thought fitt to be considered 
and put in practice in his due time. And for which also Mr. 
Smyth as preferring allwaies mocions of speciall consequence was 
exceedingly commended." MS. Records of the Virginia Com- 
pany, i, 197-200. A first edition of the Generall Historic ap- 
peared in 1624, the last two editions in 1632. The book is a 
compilation of Smith's earlier works, somewhat expanded, not to 
say inflated. The later portions are mostly made up from the 
official and qicasi-o^<:\d\ pamphlets. Just what was Dr. Sy- 
monds's part in the preparation of the Oxford Tract and the 
Generall Historie it would be interesting to know. The latter 



Chap. II. 



Note 3, 
page 38. 



62 



Rise of the First Colony. 



work was in some sense by authority of the company, and Hable 
to the pecuhar suspicion that hangs about writings designed to 
advance the colony and not primarily to record history. Its de- 
scriptive portions are of high value, and we are now able to con- 
trol its historical errors to a certain extent. Besides these three 
works on Virginia, Smith published a Description of New Eng- 
land, 1616, New England's Trials, 1620, and Advertisements for 
the Unexperienced Planters of New England or Elsewhere, in 
1 63 1, the year of his death. These all contain valuable matter 
relating to Virginia. He also published in 1627 two works on 
seamanship, a Sea Grammar, and the Accidence or Pathway to 
Experience necessary for a Young Seaman. In 1630 he pub- 
lished his True Travels, a book which contains an account of his 
own adventures previous to his going to Virginia. More than a 
quarter of a century had elapsed between the occurrence of these 
adventures and their publication. Smith's vivid imagination had 
meantime no doubt greatly magnified his own exploits. It is 
quite impossible at this day to sift what truth there is in the True 
Travels from the exaggerations. Travelers in that time were not 
held to a very rigid account, and their first obligation seems to 
have been to amuse their readers. No distinct line had yet been 
drawn in literature between fact and fiction. 

Many years ago, before I had had an opportunity to examine 
and compare all his writings, I rashly printed a brief argument in 
favor of the trustworthiness of Captain John Smith and the credi- 
bility of the Pocahontas story. I believe no person of critical 
judgment can make a thorough comparison of Smith's successive 
books without being convinced of the ineradicable tendency of his 
mind to romance in narrating adventure, especially his own ad- 
venture. Even his style where his vanity speaks loses something 
of its native directness and force. His practical writings on navi- 
gation and on the proper conduct of colonization, and his de- 
scriptions of the country and the savages, are plain, direct, and 
lucid. His speeches in the Virginia Company appear to have 
been exceedingly wise, and to have impressed his hearers. Note, 
for example, his proposals (Records, i, 197) that colonial govern- 
ors should be liable to trial in England ; his proposal to reduce 
the fee for sending a child to Virginia from five pounds to five 
marks, the cost of apprenticing to a trade (i, 174) ; and his pref- 
erence for a governor well paid to one working " for love " (Feb- 
ruary 4, 1623). His personal morals were probably unexception- 
able. One of his associates certifies to his freedom from tobacco, 



James River Experiments. 



63 



wines, dice, debts, and oaths. But a comparison between the 
statements made in the Oxford Tract and those in the Generall 
Historic leaves upon the mind of the critic a distinct impression 
of the very processes by which his adventures were exaggerated 
in his own memory as time elapsed. The three or four hundred 
savages on the Potomac (Oxford Tract, p. 32, a sufficiently mar- 
velous story) rise to three or four thousand in the Generall His- 
toric. Pocahontas becomes the central figure in incidents as told 
in 1624 in which she had no place in 161 2. There is but one al- 
lusion to Pocahontas in the entire Oxford Tract p. 103), and that 
has to do with the charge that Smith intended to marry her. A 
just and witty judgment of Captain Smith was made almost in 
his own time by Thomas Fuller. He says : " Such his perils, 
preservations, dangers, deliverances, they seem to most men be- 
yond belief, to some beyond truth. Yet we have two witnesses 
to attest them, the prose and the pictures, both in his own book ; 
and it soundeth much to the diminution of his deeds that he 
alone is the herald to publish and proclaim them. . . . However, 
moderate men must allow Captain Smith to have been very in- 
strumental in settling the plantation in Virginia, whereof he was 
Governor, as also admiral of New England." Fuller's Worthies, 
edition of 1840, i, 276. Those who desire to see an ingenious 
and learned defense of Captain Smith, particularly in the matter 
of the Pocahontas story, will find it in an address by Mr. William 
Wirt Henry, published by the Virginia Historical Society. Prof. 
Arber's discussion of the subject in his edition of Smith's Works 
is sentimental rather than critical. Compare Deane's Wingfield 
for the other side. Unnecessary heat has characterized some of 
the debates about John Smith. History pitched in a shrill polem- 
ical key is not instructive and is something less than amusing. 
These debates center themselves on the Pocahontas story, which 
is of little historical importance except as it involves the trust- 
worthiness of Smith's narrative. 

The conduct of Captain Smith in the Virginia colony will be 
better understood if we appreciate the character of his principal 
opponent, Gabriel Archer. Archer's return to Virginia in 1609 
and his agency in overthrowing Captain Smith are alluded to ap- 
parently in a passage in the New Life of Virginea, 1612, "In 
which distemper that envious man stept in, sowing plentifuU 
tares in the hearts of all," etc. One of Archer's schemes seems 
to have been to establish a parliament and a complicated govern- 
ment at the beginning. Purchas and Strachey both take sides 



Chap. II. 



64 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note 4, 
page 38. 



against Archer in his controversy with Smith. Purchas, iv, p. 
1749, Oxford Tract, 22. Wingfield warned Newport of the dan- 
ger of disturbance from Archer, who was " troubled with an am- 
bitious spirit." Wingfield's Discourse, 77, 94, 95. Wingfield 
also says, " In all their disorders was Mr. Archer a ringleader." 
He adds that Ratcliffe "did wear no other eies or eares than grew 
on Mr. Archer's head." For a bibHographical account of Smith's 
works the reader is referred to the valuable notes in Mr. Winsor's 
Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. iii, passim. 

A Trewe Relacyon, etc., at Petworth House, as above. The 
Indians in sheer wantonness scraped out the brains of their 
dead victims with mussel shells. Percy seems to have retaliated 
in a way to exasperate without disabling the savages. He 
" burned their hawses, Ransacked their Temples, tooke downe 
the corpses off their deade Kings from off their Toambes [that is, 
the scaffold on which their well-dried remains were deposited], 
and caryed away their pearles, caps, and bracelets wherewith 
they doe decore their Kings fvneralls." (For this sacred house 
thus desecrated by Percy the Indians had such reverence that 
none but priests and chiefs were allowed to enter, and the Indi- 
ans never ventured to pass it without casting some offering of 
tobacco, wampum, copper, or puccoon root into the water. — 
Strachey, 90.) When Percy had captured a chief's wife and 
children, the soldiers in revengeful wantonness, according to 
Percy's account, threw the children out of the boat and shot 
them in the water. The inefficient Percy was able to save the 
life of the "queen" or chiefs wife with difficulty. West and 
Ratcliffe, who had overthrown Smith, are accused by Percy of 
unnecessary cruelty to the savages. West sailed away in the 
ship, leaving Jamestown to its fate. Ratcliffe was put to death 
with exquisite tortures. There is no doubt some truth, as there is 
certainly jealousy, in Percy's charge that Captain Smith was "an 
ambitious, unworthy, and vainglorious fellow, attempting to take 
all men's authorities from them," but he was neither weak, like 
Percy and Ratcliffe, nor visionary, like the gold-hunting Martin 
and the doctrinary and demagogical Archer, nor treacherous and 
cruel, like West. With all his faults he only was master of the 
situation in these early years. Percy admits that the lawful au- 
thority was that of Smith. The history of the government of 
Percy and his supporters seems to justify Smith's refusal to share 
his lawful power with incompetent factionaries. 



James River Experiments. 



So far the State Papers, but Percy, in his A Trewe Relacyon, 
adds that he caused the man to be tortured till he confessed, and 
he relates repulsive details of the crime. The effrontery of an 
official publication went so far as to deny (True Declaration, 
1610), on the authority of Sir Thomas Gates, this fact so cir- 
cumstantially and abundantly attested. In Peckard's Life of 
Ferrar, p. 1 58, a petition from the Virginia colony to the king is 
preserved in which occur these words : " To tell how great things 
many of us have suffered through hunger alone would be as in- 
credible as horrible for us to repeat to your sacred ears." 

See, among other authorities, A Plaine Declaration of Barmu- 
das, in black letter, 161 3, written by one of the party. Myriads 
of birds nested on the island. How the hogs came to be there is 
matter of conjecture. The writer of the Plaine Declaration makes 
old Sir George Somcrs the resourceful hero of their marv'elous 
escape, and it was from him that the islands took the name of 
Somers or Summer Islands. For want of pitch, the seams of the 
vessels were paid with " a kind of hard lime" and some "wax 
cast up by the sea." Strachey's A True Repertory of the Wracke 
and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, etc., Purchas, 
iv, p. 1734, is also by one of the shipwrecked party. The Rev. 
Joseph Hunter has written with much learning, patient research, 
and fatiguing prolixity to disprove the theory that Shakespeare's 
Tempest was suggested by the wreck of Gates and Somers. He 
succeeds in showing its relation to another occurrence, but works 
of imagination do not usually have their origin in a single fact, 
and it is hard to resist the conviction that the Tempest, as we 
have it, contains more than one allusion to the wreck upon " the 
still vexed Bermoothes." 

The beauty of the wood of certain American trees had already 
been noted. The communion table in Jamestown in De la Warr's 
time was made of black walnut. The pews were of cedar, and 
there were " fair, broad windows," with shutters of cedar, " to 
shut and open as the weather shall occasion," but there appears 
to have been no glass. Window glass was little used at that 
time, and there probably was not a glazed window in the colony. 
The pulpit was of cedar, and the font was " hewen hollow like a 
canoa." Strachey, in Purchas, p. 1755. 

Some families appear to have gone to Virginia with De la 
Warr. The purpose to send families of wives and children and 
servants is expressed in A True Declaration, which was dated 
6 



Chap. II. 

Note 5, 
page 39. 



Note 6, 
page 41. 



Note 7, 
page 42, 



Note 8, 
page 42. 



66 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note 9, 
page 48. 



1610, but, as Mr. Alexander Brown points out, issued in Decem- 
ber, 1609. 

The Tragical! Relation of 1623, and the Briefe Declaration of 
1624, manuscripts in the British Public Record Office, are the 
most important authorities for the facts given in the text. The 
Briefe Declaration is rather the fuller, but the earlier paper sup- 
plies some particulars. These two formal documents are not 
from the same hand, and the slight difference between them in 
details tends rather to confirm than to shake the reader's confi- 
dence in their testimony. The names of Sir Francis Wyatt, 
George Sandys, and other prominent colonists appended to the 
Tragicall Relation are a guarantee of its good faith. It is curi- 
ous to note that Raphe Hamor, whose relation is so favorable to 
Dale, and who held the post of secretary under Dale and that of 
vice-admiral under Argall, signs this paper, which is a severe 
impeachment of Sir Thomas Smythe's administration of the af- 
fairs of the company before 1619. Hamor's True Discourse has 
heretofore usually been taken as an authority, but after reading 
the documents in the Public Record Office one is compelled to 
believe that Hamor, or perhaps one might say Dale, under cover 
of his secretary, misrepresents the state of the colony, and makes 
promises to those who may emigrate that it was hardly possible 
to carry out. The Discourse of the old Virginia Company (Colo- 
nial Papers, iii, 40), and other papers in the Public Record Office 
relating to the strife between the company and the Court, throw 
light on this period. The half-apologies for Dale's cruelties in 
Smith's Generall Historic, book iv, prove their existence. " For 
amongst them, so hardened in evil," says this writer, " the fear of 
a cruel, painful, and unusual death more restrains them than 
death itself." See also Hamor, p. 27. There is a letter from 
Whitaker appended to Hamor's Discourse. Though apparently 
an incidental letter, it bears marks of having been procured for 
purposes of vindication. Its defensive tone goes to show that 
the character of Dale's tyranny had transpired in England. 
Whitaker praises Sir Thomas Dale mainly for being religious and 
valiant, and says that he had "great knowledge in Divinity and 
good conscience in all his doings ; both which bee rare in a mar- 
tiall man." In Whitaker's Good Newes of Virginia, 161 3, there 
is no praise of Sir Thomas Dale. That Dale was famous for his 
severity before he left Europe is manifest from the phrase used 
by the Jesuit Biard, " Le Mareschal Thomas Deel que vous auez 
ouy estre fort aspre en ses humeurs." Relation, chap, xxxiii. 



James River Experiments. 



^7 



See in this and the preceding chapter the whole account of his 
savage temper toward his French prisoners, etc. It has been 
the custom of our older writers to speak of Dale's administration 
only in praise, but careful weighing of the original authorities 
shows that Dale was utterly pitiless in the cruelty of his disci- 
pline and unjust in his detention of the old planters, and that 
when he left the colony he was more generally execrated than 
any other man that ruled in these early days, not even excepting 
his successor, Argall. Dale's severity was serviceable in carrying 
the enterprise through straits, but the reports of his harshness 
brought the colony into disrepute and checked immigration. The 
detestation of Dale was shared by the best men in Virginia, yet it 
is to be remembered that the savagery of Dale's government was 
due not wholly to the brutal temper of the man, but partly to the 
age and the school in which he had been bred. Legal torture was 
in use long after this. The Clarendon Papers, quoted by Southey, 
state that at Henley-on-Thames, as late as 1646, it was ordered 
that a woman's tongue should be nailed to a tree for complaining 
of the tax levied by Parliament. The cruel practices of the agents 
of the Virginia Company are paralleled by those of the East In- 
dia Company at the same time. " Before they were intrusted 
with martial law they made it a rule to whip to death or star\e 
to death those of whom they wished to get rid." Mills, British 
India, i, 38. Even that champion of popular liberty. Sir Edwin 
Sandys, found it in his heart to approve of Dale's course while 
admitting its harshness. He said to the court of the Virginia 
Company of the 17th of November, 1619, that " Sir Thomas Dale, 
building upon these foundations with great and constant severity, 
reclaymed almost miraculously those idle and disordered people, 
and reduced them to labor and an honest fashion of life." MS. 
Records of the Virginia Company. Compare also Sir Thomas 
Smythe's defense, note to Aspinwall Papers in IV Massachusetts 
Plistorical Collections, ix, p. i. My citations from the Tragicall 
Relation and Briefe Declaration are partly from the originals in 
the British Public Record Office, which I carefully examined in 
1885, but the first of these is printed in Neill's Virginia Company, 
and the Briefe Declaration was published by the State of Vir- 
ginia in 1874 in a Senate document entitled Colonial Records of 
Virginia. Very good abstracts of both papers appear in Sains- 
bury's Calendar. I cite the Discourse of the Old Virginia Com- 
pany from the MS. in the British Public Record Office. I do not 
remember to have seen it in print. 



Chap. II. 



68 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 

Note lo, 
page 49. 



Note II, 
page 49. 



Note 12, 
page 49. 



Note 13, 
page 51. 



Birch's Court of James I, i, 415. Chamberlain to Carleton, 
June 22, 1616 : " Sir Thomas Dale is arrived from Virginia, and 
brought with him some ten or twelve old and young of that coun- 
try, among whom is Pocahuntas, daughter of Powhatan, married 
to one Rolfe, an Englishman. I hear not of any other riches or 
matter of worth, but only some quantity of sassafras, tobacco, 
pitch, tar, and clapboard, things of no great value unless there 
were plenty, and nearer hand. All I can hear of it is, that the 
country is good to live in, if it were stored with people, and might 
in time become commodious. But there is no present profit to 
be expected." 

The Discourse of the Old Virginia Company, an exceedingly 
interesting manuscript in the British Record Office, makes it ap- 
pear that as late as 161 8 the colonists had no thought of staying 
in Virginia, and even the directors at home were interested only 
in making money out of tobacco and sassafras, with little or no 
care to plant a permanent colony. Some allowance must be 
made, perhaps, for the ex-parte nature of this paper, but its tone 
and the high character of those who offered it give reason to trust 
it. Colonial Papers, iii, 40. Answer of the Virginia Company to 
Queries of the Privy Council in 1625. 

We may trust Hamor's True Discourse, p. 17, for some of 
these details, though the book generally is discredited by the 
account given in the Tragicall Relation, which Hamor himself 
signed with others in 1623. A comparison of all these authori- 
ties makes it evident that only eighty-one who were ranked as 
"farmers" derived any benefit from Dale's three-acre division, 
while about two hundred others were probably left in unmitigated 
bondage. 

" And to protect Captain Argall from being called to an ac- 
count for his government under shew of a new plantation to be 
set up in Virginia by Captain Argall and his partners, whereof 
the said earl (Warwick) hath since appeared to be one (which yet 
to this day hath had no beginning), there was procured a patent 
to the said captain and his associates for the said new plantation ; 
whereby he and his Company, their heirs and assigns (save only 
in time of defence by war), were exempted from all power, author- 
ity, and jurisdiction to be from hence derived or there established, 
that so he might reign there as great and absolute master, with- 
out law or controulment, and without the fear of ever being called 
to any future reckoning. . . . Whatsoever was remaining at that 



Jarnes River Experiments. 



69 



time in the colony belonging to the public ... he converted it 
in a manner wholly to his own private use and possession, the 
very public lands cultivated, the Company's tenants and servants, 
their rents, corn and tributes of corn, their kine and other cattle, 
their stores and other provisions ; whereby the company, being 
disabled in all appearance of ever setting up the same again or to 
bear the great burden of public charge both at home and abroad, 
being thus stripped of all revenue, the said Company must have 
failed and decayed and the whole colony have fallen in time into 
the hands of the said captain and his association to be there es- 
tablished, which seemeth to have been his prime and original 
desire. . . . This course of depredation and roving not sufficing 
as likely to receive encounter and check from hence, new engines 
were used, some to dishearten and some to disgrace the Company, 
that so as it seemeth they might in time obtain the plantation and 
leave it as a prey to the said captain, his friends and followers, 
etc." Burk's History of Virginia, Appendix, vol. i. The extract 
is from the document known as The Company's Chief Root of 
Differences, etc. I have compared this copy with that in the MS. 
Records of the Virginia Company, Library of Congress, and find 
only slight verbal differences. At the instance of Warwick the 
authors of this paper — Lord Cavendish, Sir Edwin Sandys, and 
John and Nicholas Ferrar — were put under arrest in their own 
houses for this " impertinent declaration." The Warwick party 
had made " threats of blood " to deter Southampton from com- 
plaining to the king. 

Birch's Court and Times of James the First, i, 31 1. Chamber- 
lain to Carleton, May 16, 1614 : " Sir Thomas Gates is come from 
Virginia, and brings word that plantation will fall to the ground 
if it be not presently supplied. He speaks of worjderful com- 
modities that are to be had there if we could but have patience 
and would be at the cost to bring them to perfection." Out of 
this necessity for some present support came the great lottery. 
It was recommended by the Privy Council to the Mayor of Can- 
terbury, February 22, 161 5. There was a "running lottery" of 
smaller adventures in Paul's Churchyard before the " great stand- 
ing lottery " was instituted, and then there were other " running 
lotteries " " in many other places after." Purchas, p. 1773- No 
doubt there were corruptions and abuses in these lotteries. The 
merchants prospered while Virginia languished. Its unpopularity 
is attributed to " malignant tongues," in the MS. Records of the 



Chap. II. 



Note 14, 
page 53. 



70 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note 15, 
page 55. 



Note 16, 
page 56. 



Virginia Company, i, 158, and the overthrow of the lotterj^ may 
have been part of the plot of those who sought soon after to 
wreck the company itself. 

My attention was first attracted to the date of the Great 
Charter of November 13, 1618, by a minute in the handwriting 
of Secretary Williamson in the Public Record Office, as follows : 
" Those Adventurers & Planters by Vertue of ye sd Letfs Patent 
of Incorporacon &c. made a Great charter of Lawes & Ord" for 
ye govermnt of the Countrj'. It bore date at London, Nov, 13th 
1618." Col. Pprs, i, II. The proceedings of the first Assem- 
bly in Virginia are preserved in the Public Record Office in 
Pory's Report. This report gives the only information we have 
regarding the provisions of this long-lost charter. An abstract 
of these proceedings is printed in the Calendar of Colonial Docu- 
ments, and the whole document was reprinted in the New York 
Historical Society Collections, second series, vol. iii, and yet more 
carefully in the Colonial Records of Virginia, 1874. There is an 
allusion to this charter in the Briefe Relation, 1624. Various 
Virginia land grants deduce their authority from the Great Char- 
ter of Laws and Orders of November 13, 1618, as we learn from 
a note in the Aspinwall Papers, p. 14. There are many allusions 
to the charter of 161 8 in the Manuscript Records of the Virginia 
Company in the Library of Congress. 

The Code of Lawes, Divine, Morall and INLirtiall, by which 
Dale reigned was edited and published by Strachey in 161 2, and 
reprinted in Force's Tracts, vol. iii. This code appears to have 
had no other sanction than the approval of Sir Thomas Smythe, 
the governor of the company. The beneficial effect of these law'S 
is maintained in Hamor's Discourse, in Rolfe's Relation, and in 
certain letters of Dale in the Record Office. It was not, indeed, 
the government by martial law, but Dale's abuse of his power, 
that wrought the mischief. After the emancipation the old set- 
tlers lived in perpetual terror lest some turn of the wheel should 
put them once more in the power of Sir Thomas Smythe and his 
divine and martial laws. See especially the Additional Statement 
appended to the Discourse of the Old Virginia Company. On the 
long and bitter dissension that resulted in the overthrow of the 
company, see Arthur Woodnoth's Short Collection of the most 
remarkable Passages from the Original to the Dissolution of the 
Virginia Company, a rare work of great value to the historian of 
this period. 



James River Experiments. 



n 



Rolfe's Relation has it that the ship which brought Yeardley 
brought also the news of the election of Sandys and John Ferrar. 
But Yeardley arrived in Virginia on the i8th of April (O. S.), and 
Sir Thomas Smythe's resignation did not take place until ten days 
later. Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company. The news 
that Sir George Yeardley did bring was no doubt that the power 
of Sir Thomas Smythe and his party was broken, and that the 
actual control of affairs was in the hands of such men as Sandys, 
Southampton, Cavendish, Danvers, and the two Ferrars. The 
whole policy of the company indicates that the new party was 
really in power, and the appointment ot such a man as Yeardley 
was probably the work of the rising party. The records before 
the resignation of Sir Thomas Smythe were probably destroyed 
for purposes of concealment. 

Manuscript Book of Instructions, etc., Library of Congress. 
Letter to the Governor and Council by the ship Marmaduke, 
August 12, 1 62 1. A proposal to send women had been made 
seven years earlier. Commons Journal, i, 487, May 17, 1614. 
Extract from Martyn's Speech (for which he was reprimanded) : 
" That they require but a few honest Labourers burthened with 
Children. — Moveth, a committee may consider of the means for 
this, for Seven Years ; at which some of the Company may be 
present." On November 17, 1619, Sir Edwin Sandys pointed 
out in the court of the company that the people of Virginia 
" were not settled in their mindes to make it their place of rest 
and continuance." " For the remedying of the Mischiefe and 
for establishing a perpetuitie of the Plantation," he proposed the 
sending of " one hundred young maides to become wives." Manu- 
script Records of the Virginia Company, i, 44, 45. Two women, 
the first in the colony, had arrived in September, 1608. Oxford 
Tract, 47. There were women in Gates's party in 1610. It was 
even reported that some English women had intermingled with 
the natives. Calendar Colonial Papers, i. 1 3. An allowance of food 
to women in De la Warr's time is proof that women were there. 
In 1629 there was living Mistress Pearce, "an honest, industrious 
woman," who had been in Virginia " near twenty years." Rolfe 
(a copy of whose Relation is among the Duke of Manchester's 
MSS. now in the British Public Record Office) sets down a re- 
mainder of seventy-five of the three hundred and fifty-one persons 
in the colony at Dale's departure, as women and children. It is 
worth recalling here that D'Ogeron, who governed Santo Do- 



Chap. II. ty 

Note 17, 
page 56. 



Note 18, 
page 57. 



VX 



JX 



72 



Rise of the First Colotiy. 



Book I. 



Note 19, 
page 58, 



v< 



mingo in 1663 and after, supplied the buccaneers with wives 
brought from France ; and the plan was also put into practice in 
Louisiana about a century later than the Virginia experiment, and 
the same expedient, as is well known, was resorted to in Canada. 
In Virginia more pains were taken to have all the women thus 
imported of a good character than in some of the French colonies. 

The belief that these maids were " pressed " or coerced into 
going is probably erroneous (see the speech of Sandys, July 7, 
1620, Manuscript Records of the Virginia Company). He says, 
" These people (including the maids) are to be provided as they 
have formerly beene, partlie by printed publication of the supplies 
indicated, together with the conditions offered to these publique 
tennants, partlie by help of such noble friends and others in re- 
mote parts as have formerlie given great assistance." The notion 
that some of the maidens were pressed seems to have had its rise 
in the counterfeiting of the great seal and the issuing of forged 
commissions to press maidens for " breeders for the King " in the 
Bermudas and Virginia in order to extort money. One Owen 
Evans was accused of such practices in October, 161 8 (Sains- 
bury, p. 19), and one Robinson was hanged, drawn, and quartered 
for this or similar offences in November of the same year (Birch's 
Court of James I, 108). In order to encourage the adventurers 
or shareholders to subscribe to the sending of maids, a town was 
laid off in Virginia to be called Maydstown. The subscribers 
were to be allowed shares in this town. Manuscript Records, 
May 20, 1622, on the general subject ; also Records under date 
of November 3, 1621, and the 17th of the same month, June li, 
and November 21, 1621, and the manuscript book in the Library 
of Congress, which I refer to in these notes as Manuscript Book 
of Instructions, pp. 76 and 89. I may remark here that this 
book has not been in use in recent times for reference. Its origin 
is uncertain, nor can the authorities of the library tell where it 
came from. It was compiled in the latter part of the seventeenth 
century, judging from internal evidence, and was perhaps kept 
among the records of the colony for reference on what we should 
call constitutional questions. I found a loose memorandum laid 
in its pages in the handwriting of Thomas Jefferson, to whom the 
book probably once belonged. 



CHAPTER THE THIRD. 

THE PROCESSION OF MOTIVES. 



I. 

The cause of the sorrows of Virginia will be 
more plainly seen if we turn again to the motives 
that propelled Englishmen to plant a colony. The 
chief mistake lay in the main purpose. If the 
founding of a state had been other than a second- 
ary and remote end, the managers might have sent 
at first families and not bachelors, farmers and not 
gentlemen, laborers and not riff-raff. But more 
visionary motives dominated the action. A state 
was planted, but something else was mainly in- 
tended by the first projectors. The work seemed 
continuous, but the end in view shifted and the 
actors gradually changed. The only motive that 
held from first to last, and ran through all the rest, 
was the rivalry with Spain. 

The colonies attempted by Frobisher and Gil- 
bert were to serve as relays in the work of explora- 
tion for a sea passage to the Pacific and the search 
for mines, but they mark strongly the influence of 
the Spanish example on English projects. Ralegh 
was a lifelong opponent in peace and war of Span- 
ish intrigue and aggression, and his efforts to plant 
colonies in the virgin land were suggested by a 

73 



Chap. III. 

The chief 
mistake. 



The rival- 
ry with 
Spain. 



74 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Lane to 
Sydney. 

Aug. 12, 

1585. 
Sainsbury. 

Lane to 
Walsing- 
ham. Aug. 
12, 1585. 
Sainsbury. 



Note I. 



Delusions 
in colony- 
planting. 



knowledge of the almost exhaustless treasure that 
flowed into Spanish coffers from America. The op- 
portune capture of a Spanish carack bound home- 
ward from Mexico with letters describing the wealth 
of P^Iexican mines brought the support of English 
merchants to Ralegh's undertaking. Imbued with 
the same spirit, Ralegh's governor wrote from 
Roanoke Island in 1585 that his colony would be 
a means of deliverance from the domination of 
Spain, " whose strength doth altogether grow 
from the mines of her treasure." In the perilous 
isolation of the little company on Roanoke Island, 
Lane assures himself that God w411 feed his men 
by means of ravens rather than suffer their " ene- 
mies the papists " " to triumph at the overthrow 
of this most Christian action." The home-staying 
English of that age were spurred to colony-planting 
by three main motives — cupidity, patriotic feeling, 
and religious zeal — and all of these were provoked 
by emulation and jealousy of Spain. 

11. 

The prolonged movement for a colonial estab- 
lishment, which extended over the latter half of 
the reign of Elizabeth and almost the whole of the 
reign of James I, was kept alive by delusions. The 
ultimate ends for which colonies were proposed 
and planted in the last quarter of the sixteenth 
and the first quarter of the seventeenth century 
were none of them attained. The movable pas- 
sage through North America to the Pacific wa.s 



The Procession of Motives. 



75 



still leading explorers a merry dance when the 
first Jamestown emigrants sailed in 1606, and gold 
mines of comminuted mica, of iron p)'rites, of In- 
dian mineral paints, and of pure fable were potent 
attractions for some time after. The gradual in- 
crease of geographical knowledge caused the 
"South Sea" to take shelter in the unknown re- 
gion behind the mountains, and the gold mines 
reported by Indians and discovered by sanguine 
prospectors were somehow lost in the interminable 
forests. In this exigency the first colony must 
have perished for want of support if new hopes 
as illusive as the old had not moved the English 
people to avert such a calamity. 

The production of commodities which the un- 
genial climate of the British Islands refused to 
grow was thought of from the beginning, and they 
became after 1616 the main hope of wealth from 
Virginia. It seemed grievous that England should 
spend her money in buying wine and silk from 
southern Europe and naval stores from the Baltic. 
The only maxim of political economy generally 
accepted in that day was that a nation is enriched 
by getting money from abroad and keeping it at 
home. The precious metals constituted the only 
recognized riches. Laws were made to restrain 
the exportation of gold and silver, and sumptuary 
laws to discourage the consumption of those things 
that must be bought of the foreigner. Efforts to 
raise in Great Britain the products of the Mediter- 
ranean region would have proved successful if the 



Chap. III. 



Commodi- 
ties. 



For exam- 
ple, Car- 
lisle's 
treatise, 
Anderson's 
Commerce, 
year 1583. 



76 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 
Wine. 



Silk. 

Anderson 
on the 
year 1589. 



1609. 



climate had been half as favorable to such enter- 
prises as the government. The arguments ad- 
vanced in favor of the possibility of producing 
wine in England did much, no doubt, to secure the 
sunshine of royal favor for experiments made to 
that end, but climatic conditions were inexorable. 
King James busied himself to no profit in raising 
mulberry trees and nursing a private stock of silk- 
worms, in imitation of Henry IV, the reigning 
King of France, who succeeded in producing co- 
coons in the Tuileries but not in making silk 
culture profitable in the north of France. INIulber- 
ries were first planted in England in 1608, two 
years after the sailing of the Virginia argonauts. 
James sent circulars to persons of influence among 
his subjects asking them to cultivate mulberry 
trees, and, in the years immediately following, the 
silk fever ran its course alongside the excitement 
about the great lottery in behalf of the Virginia 
colony. Hakluyt, spreading sails for America in 
every breeze, hastened to announce at the first 
mention of silk culture that mulberry trees, " apt to 
feed silke wormes to make silke," were a " chicfe 
commoditie" of Virginia. 

The first principles that govern colony-planting 
were not yet understood. It was proposed to force 
everything from a forlorn camp of men dwelling 
under roofs of bark and sedge, environed by treach- 
erous foes and in constant peril of starvation. The 
raising of silkworms was begun in Virginia in 161 3, 
and before the colony was nine years old it was 



The Procession of Motives, 



77 



able to send to England silk that doubtless had 
cost more than a hundred times its market value. 
The experiment came to nothing. It could not 
have happened otherwise amid the miseries of 
those early years. The rats, which opportunely 
destroyed the eggs of the silk moth, were made to 
bear the responsibility for the failure. 

Silk was little known in England at the begin- 
ning of Elizabeth's reign, but it came into great 
request a few years later. In 1617 Lord Carew 
declares that there is " a madness for silk instead 
of cloth." This rage for silk led to the establish- 
ment of silk manufacturing in England ; throw- 
sters, dyers, and weavers were brought to England 
from abroad and settled in Spitalfields, " the 
cheap end of its metropolis," and in Moorfields. 
It seemed more than ever important to produce 
silk in the king's dominions, in order to supply 
these manufacturers with material without impor- 
tation from alien lands. Accordingly, a new effort 
was made in 1620 to secure raw silk from Virginia. 
The Earl of Southampton, ever eager to promote 
the Virginia colony, " writt into Italy, France, and 
Spayne " for silkworm " seed " ; the king gave 
some from his own stock, and the expert who had 
charge of the king's worms was sent over to look 
after the business. A French book on the sub- 
ject was translated to instruct the colonists. The 
first Virginia Assembly in 16 19 had passed a law 
to promote the raising of the mulberry. To save 
expense, the colonists at this time, or later, planted 



Chap. III. 



A ne^v silk 
fever. 

Cal. Dom. 
S. P. 

James I, p. 
428. 



Pory's Re- 
port, Pub. 
Rec. Off. 



78 



Rise of tJie First Colony 



Book I. 

Phil. 
Trans. I, 

20I. 

Hening i, 
14. 



Original 
Records of 
Colony 
of Va. 



Note 2. 



1655- 



the trees in hedgerows and mowed them with a 
scythe. In 162 1 orders were sent from England 
that none but members of the Council and the 
heads of hundreds should wear silk, unless they 
had made it themselves. The prohibition shows 
how general was the craze for silk clothing. The 
climate of Virginia proved genial enough, but the 
massacre of 1622, the bitter Indian conflicts that 
ensued in 1623, and the epidemic of the same year, 
following one another swiftly, were enough to an- 
nihilate a hundred feeble projects. The real doom 
of silk-raising, however, came from the fact that 
the culture of tobacco in virgin soil was incalcu- 
lably more profitable and vastly less troublesome 
to pioneers than hatching silkworms' eggs in one's 
pocket or bosom, or sleeping with them in a small 
box under one's bolster and covering them in the 
warm bed on rising. The project was blighted 
in the bud by adverse economic conditions — a 
killing frost more deadly to such enterprises than 
an ungenial climate. But a lesson in economic 
principles is one of the hardest for men to learn. 
Long after the colony had become prosperous, 
English projectors and Virginia experimenters 
tried again and again to supplant tobacco with 
silk. If we may credit the report, Virginia fur- 
nished a coronation robe of silk for Charles I, 
and Charles II certainly wore silk from worms 
hatched and fed in his Virginia dominions. One 
Esquire Digges brought Armenians to Virginia to 
attend his worms. But in the Reformed Virginia 



The Procession of Motives. 



79 



Silkworm, by Hartlib, the friend of Milton, it is 
announced that a young lady had discovered that 
silkworms would care for themselves on the trees, 
" to the instant wonderful enrichment of all the 
planters there, requiring neither cost, labour, or 
hindrance in an}^ of their other employments." It 
is also suggested on the eager title-page of the 
pamphlet that " the Indians, seeing and finding 
that there is neither Art, Pains, or Skill in the 
thing," will " incontinently fall to raising silk." 
Not only were the gentle savages, and especially 
their women and children, to devote themselves to 
silk, but the American caterpillar — " the natural 
silkworm" as it was called — was expected to spin 
for the market if his cocoon could be " refined." 

By 1666 the silk delusion had passed, and the 
Virginia Assembly repealed all acts for the en- 
couragement of mulberry trees. Ten years later, 
Glover, the botanist, found many of these trees 
still standing as melancholy witnesses to the waste 
of energy by the earlier promoters and settlers of 
the colony. Almost ever}' other American colony 
made the same experiment for itself, and Virginia 
renewed its endeavors from time to time, each 
generation forgetting what its fathers had learned. 

III. 

Along with the silk fever went the silk-grass 
craze. Ralegh's people had seen the Indians 
wearing garments woven of the fiber of the Yucca 
filame7itosa, the " Adam's needle and thread " of 



Chap. III. 



Comp. Va. 
Richly Val- 
ued, 1650, 
and Leah 
and Ra- 
chel, 1656. 

Note 3. 



Hening ii, 

242. 



Phil. 

Trans. XI, 
628. 



Silk-grass. 
1585- 



8o 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 

A Briefe 
and True 
Report of 
the New 
Found 
Land of 
Virginia. 



Proceed- 
ings of Va. 
Assembly, 
1619. 
2d N. Y. 
Hist. 
Society 
Coll. iii, 
348. 



Purchas 
IV, p. 
1777. 

Instr. of 24 
July, 1624. 
MS. Bk. of 
Instr. Libr. 
of Cong. 



our popular speech. Hariot, in his account of it, 
declares that " the like grows in Persia," and that 
much of the " silk-works " coming thence to 
Europe was made of this fiber. He probably 
confounded the yucca with the ramie plant of the 
East, of which grass cloth is made. Of the yucca 
fiber taken to England in 1585, *' a piece of silk 
grogram " was made, and of course pronounced 
" excellent good " ; it was even presented to the 
queen. The coarse and rather brittle fiber of this 
plant was exalted by enthusiasts into something 
nearly equal to silk. Ordinances for planting it 
were sent from England ; at least one legislative 
act in its favor was passed by the Virginia Assem- 
bly, and the most foolish hopes were entertained 
regarding the profit to be had from it. By 1619 it 
had come to be called " silk flax," and it was then 
advocated for homelier uses, such as cordage and 
linen, and every householder was compelled by 
law to set a hundred plants ; the governor himself 
set five thousand. In 1624 it is spoken of as "a 
commoditie of speciall hope and much use." 
There were by this time those who ventured to 
say that the silk-grass enterprise was " full of diffi- 
cultie " ; but the managers in England easily got 
rid of this objection by attributing the difficulty 
to " negligence and want of experience." They 
were just then intent on finding some commodity 
that would take the place of tobacco, which was 
frowned upon by both court and Parliament. In 
spite of all discouragement, the hope of good re- 



The Procession of Motives. 



8i 



suits from the yucca fiber outlasted that genera- 
tion, and was in full vigor in 1649, sixty-four years 
after Hariot's mistake. 

IV. 

It was also proposed to produce wine in Vir- 
ginia for English consumption. No more gold 
and silver should go out of the realm to buy port 
and canary to the profit of foreigners and the im- 
poverishment of the good and loyal subjects of his 
Majesty. The instructions on this point were clear, 
and before the Virginia exiles had secured bread 
to stay their hunger they had made wine of the 
sour wild grapes of the country. French vine- 
dressers were sent over a little later and were for- 
bidden to plant tobacco, but were compelled to 
employ themselves about vines, with the care of 
silkworms for variety. In 162 1 these Frenchmen 
sent to England a cask of wine, the arrival of which 
was duly celebrated. Other experimental casks of 
wine were afterward sent to England from America 
at long intervals, but without decreasing the profits 
of wine growers in the Old World. 

All the commodities sought from Virginia were 
unsuited to conditions in a new country. To the 
folly of making such experiments at all where liv- 
ing itself was an experiment, the managers added 
the folly of crowding a multiplicity of problematic 
enterprises on the colony at the same time. With 
a virgin continent in which to produce novelties, 
all things seemed possible in an age so hopeful. 
7 



Chap. III. 



Wine. 



MS. Rec. 
Va. Co. i, 
343- 



Other 

products 

sought. 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Nova Brit- 
tania. 



Timber 
and naval 
stores. 

MS. Rec. 
Va. Co. 31 
May and 23 
June, 1620. 



Note 4. 



Plants of every clime grew rank in the imagina- 
tion of projectors. Virginia was a wonderland, 
and it was readily believed without evidence that 
the *' soyle and clymate " were " very apt and fit 
for sugar canes " ; " also linseed and rapeseeds to 
make oiles," as a black-letter pamphlet of 1609 ex- 
presses it. Along with '' orenges, limons, and al- 
monds," this official writer proposes to plant " an- 
niseeds, rice, cummin, cottonwool, carroway seeds, 
ginger, madder, olives, oris, sumacke," and, as if 
this breathless list were not enough for one new 
land, he adds, " and many such like that I can not 
now name." If we may trust the publications of 
the company, various West India plants were tried 
in the very first days of the colony, while the three- 
fold peril of death from famine, pestilence, and sav- 
age war was imminent. 

But it was not enough to wring from an infant 
colony the products of the south ; those derived 
from the north of Europe were straightway to 
be got there also. German millwrights — " Dutch 
carpenters," in the phrase of the records — were 
brought from Hamburg by John Ferrar to build 
Virginia sawmills ; timber was still sawed by hand 
in England. Pitch, tar, and potash were to be 
produced by Poles sent out for the purpose in the 
second year of the colony. Patriotism dictated 
that England should be relieved of her dependence 
on foreign countries for naval stores. Virginia 
had forests : why should she not produce these 
thinofs? 



The Procession of Motives. 



83 



It had been found that the savages eagerly re- 
ceived glass beads in exchange for corn and pel- 
tries. Nothing more was required to prove the 
profitableness of glass-making. Some Germans 
were sent to the colony in 1608, and glass works 
were established. For some reason no proper ma- 
terials were available at first, and it became neces- 
sary to request that sand might be sent from 
England to make Virginia glass of at the glass 
works in the woods near Jamestown. The Ger- 
man glass blowers were prone to run away to the 
Indians, among whom work was lighter and food 
more abundant. The tribesmen encouraged these 
desertions by providing dusky wives for the men 
whose skill with tools and weapons they valued 
highly. In 162 1 the glass business was revived, 
and this time it was intrusted to Italian workmen. 
About the same time iron works were established 
at Falling Creek, with " forty skilled workmen from 
Sussex to carry them forward." Twenty-five ship 
carpenters were sent to ply their trade on the 
James River, and it was also arranged that oil was 
to be distilled from walnuts by the " apothecaries." 
George Sandys was sent over in July, 162 1, to have 
entire control of all schemes for staple commodi- 
ties. There was a certain fitness in intrusting these 
creatures of the imagination to a poet. Pineap- 
ples, plantains, and other fruits were to be started 
forthwith. There was once again great hope from 
the " rich commodity of silk," an endowed school 
for Indians was founded, and the little Virginia 



Chap. III. 



Glass- 
making. 



Note s. 



Iron 
works. 



Note 6. 



84 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 

Result 
of the 

massacre. 



Tobacco. 

A Covnter- 
Blaste to 
Tobacco, 
1604. 



Note 7. 



pool became iridescent with many frail bubbles. 
The sudden and frightful massacre b}^ the savages 
in March, 1622, obliterated instantly all vain and 
premature projects. This calamity did not cause 
the failure of these foredoomed schemes ; it only 
saved them from a painful and lingering death, and 
provided their friends with a decent epitaph for 
them. The people who survived the massacre 
were decimated by an epidemic in the following 
year. What strength they could spare from fre- 
quent battles with the savages they spent in grow- 
ing corn and tobacco, which last, of all the things 
tried, proved to be the only commodity profitable 
for export. 



Against tobacco King James had written a 
book. It was denounced in Parliament and re- 
garded by all public-spirited men as an evil. Nev- 
ertheless, it turned the scale and saved the colony. 
In colony-planting the problem is fundamentally an 
economic one, and economic problems are solved 
by coarse and homely means. John Rolfe, the 
first Englishman that ventured to wed an Indian, 
planted the first tobacco at Jamestown in 161 2, and 
by 1616 the better West India variety had perhaps 
been substituted for the harsh kind grown by the 
Virginia Indians, and by them called " uppowoc " 
or "apooke." Tobacco prospered and was profit- 
able, to the disgust of the pedantic king and the 
sorrow of all who had cherished hopes of beautiful 



TJie Procession of Motives. 



85 



products from a colony upon which so much po- 
etic sentiment had been lavished. Neither gold 
nor spices came as had been expected ; the strings 
of pearls seen by Ralegh's men were not again to 
be found, or were perhaps transformed on investi- 
gation into wampum beads ; the silver mine once 
discovered on the upper James had vanished for- 
ever; tropical fruits refused to grow; even mad- 
der and woad failed, and, though the indigo plant 
would readily mature, nobody knew how to manu- 
facture the dye. Silk was troublesome and un- 
profitable, shipbuilding, and such coarse but patri- 
otic products as naval stores had come to naught. 
But the detestable " weed," as King James had 
dubbed it, throve apace. As early as 1617 the 
waste margins of the broad streets of James- 
town were planted with it by the eager settlers. 
The English merchants grasped at the profits 
of it, the farmers of the customs rejoiced in the 
heavy duties imposed on it, and a powerful mer- 
cenary interest in the prosperity of Virginia was 
established. By 1624, when the Virginia Com- 
pany was dissolved, the danger that the colony 
would be abandoned as a result of Spanish in- 
trigues, Indian massacres, or prolonged discour- 
agement had passed away. Public spirit, patriot- 
ism, and religious enthusiasm no longer guarded 
it as a feeble house plant. It had struck root in 
the outdoor soil of human self-interest and its life 
was assured. From that time the colony that had 
been for seventeen years a fairyland to dreamers 



Chap. III. 



Note 8. 



86 



Rise of the First Colony. 



BCOK I. 



Note 9. 



Motives of 
sentiment. 



Rise of tha 
patriot 
party in 
the Vir- 
ginia Com- 
pany. 



in England and a perdition to its inhabitants, be- 
came a sober money-making enterprise, uninterest- 
ing to enthusiasts and philanthropists. 

VI. 

In the preceding sections of this chapter we 
have traced what may be called the series of com- 
mercial motives that, sometimes in succession, 
often in co-operation, propelled the Virginia move- 
ment. The agitation for a colony was primarily 
a commercial one. The London or Virginia Com- 
pany by which it was carried forward had been 
organized in the form of the great trading cor- 
porations of the time, such as the Muscovy Com- 
pany and the East India Company, and it was 
expected to yield large returns. But though com- 
mercial in form and purpose, the Virginia Com- 
pany from the outset was able to appeal success- 
fully in every emergency to motives that were far 
from mercenary. Into the chain-threads of com- 
mercial enterprise was woven a woof of patriotic 
feeling and religious sentiment. 

VII. 

Dale's empty-handed return, and Argall's home- 
coming with hands full of the spoil of both colony 
and colonists, were severe blows to the hope of 
profit from Virginia, and thereafter commercial 
motives fell to a second place. The company 
began to pass more and more out of the control 
of traders like Sir Thomas Smyth and Alderman 



The Procession of Motives. 



87 



Johnson, and the corrupt clique of predatory mer- 
chants, as well as out of the reach of voracious 
noblemen like Warwick. More and more it passed 
into the hands of the great liberal statesmen whose 
leader was the incorruptible Sir Edwin Sandys, a 
man of rare gifts and knowledge and of great reso- 
luteness. These men had suffered some disap- 
pointment, no doubt, in their struggle for parlia- 
mentary freedom in England. They might have 
succeeded better had their antagonist been a 
strong king, but against the pusillanimity, the van- 
ity, the vacillation, and the pedantic dogmatism of 
James little permanent headway could be made. 
Without relinquishing the conflict in the House of 
Commons, they took it up in the Quarter Courts 
of the Virginia Company. In this new field they 
found themselves afresh confronted by the obsti- 
nacy of the king, who was stirred up to oppose 
them by the discarded governor. Sir Thomas 
Smyth, and his friends, by Warwick, and by all 
the partisans of high prerogative and all the ad- 
vocates of the Spanish match. "Bedchamber men" 
and others about the king's person were engaged 
to work upon the king to come to the rescue of 
Sir Thomas Smyth's " honor." The Spanish am- 
bassador Gondomar, who had spies in the Virginia 
Company, took pains to feed James's discontent. 
He told the king that it was time for him to look 
into the Virginia courts, which were held in the 
great hall of the house of the Ferrar family. Too 
many of the king's nobility and gentry resorted 



Chap. III. 



Wood- 
noth's 
Short Col- 
lection, p. 
6. 



Peckard's 

Ferrar, 

"3- 



88 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Sir Edwin 
Sandys. 



Royal 
Hist. MS. 
Comm. 
viii, II 45 



The king's 
interfer- 
ence. 

1620. 



thither, in order to be in company with the popu- 
lar Lord Southampton and the dangerous Sandys. 
They were deep politicians, and they entertained 
designs beyond a tobacco plantation. Their lead- 
ers, he said, were " subtle men of high courage 
who regarded neither his master nor their own." 

Sandys, as assistant to Sir Thomas Smyth and 
virtual governor, had already succeeded in estab- 
lishing in Virginia a constitutional state with a 
representative government. He was furthering 
plans for the foundation of the little separatist 
state of New Plymouth, and his enemies set ago- 
ing tales that he had dark designs of removing 
with the Pilgrims to America, in order to found a 
democratic state there. In 1619 Sir Thomas 
Smyth tendered his resignation, and the company, 
to his surprise, it would appear, accepted it, and 
chose Sandys to his place. When, in 1620, his 
first year of government drew to a close, Sir 
Edwin Sandj's erected an elegant ballot-box in the 
midst of the hall of the Ferrars, that the brilliant 
assemblage of noblemen, knights, gentlemen, and 
merchants might by a secret vote exercise the 
right of choice without any constraint. Just as 
the assemblage was about to begin voting, two 
clerks of the signet were announced with a mes- 
sage from the king forbidding the company to 
choose Sand3's. " Choose the devil, if you will, 
but not Sir Edwin Sandys," was one form in which 
the king expressed his aversion. Southampton, 
braving the king's displeasure, allowed himself to 



TJie Procession of Motives. 



89 



be elected, with Sandys for deputy. In June, 162 1, 
both Southampton and Sandys were imprisoned. 
This attracted attention to Virginia as a " refuge 
from a more oppressive government in England." 
In three months' time twenty-five ships set sail for 
the colony, which gained an impetus from the 
king's opposition that put it beyond the danger 
of destruction by the calamities of the next two 
years. Even before the massacre and pestilence 
of 1622 and 1623, Southampton was assured by 
friends at court that it would come to " push of 
pike," and that the company would be over- 
thrown. The charter of the company was va- 
cated in 1624, but free government had so taken 
root in the colony that it could never afterward be 
quite extirpated. A new English state with a 
popular government had been founded of delib- 
erate purpose by a group of English statesmen, at 
the head of which, and easily first, was Sir Edwin 
Sandys, whose great service to the people and na- 
tion that were to come has been almost forgotten. 

VIII. 

We shall not have taken a just account of Vir- 
ginia colonization if we do not reckon religious 
motives among the many forces that carried that 
wavering enterprise to success. From the excite- 
ment about American exploration and coloniza- 
tion the English church caught its first mission- 
ary impulse. The Indian captives brought from 
America at various times gave to Englishmen 



Chap. III. 



A land of 
freedom. 



Note 10. 



Religious 

propa- 

gandistn. 



90 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note II. 



Zeal of the 
clergy. 



the novel sight of men and women from beyond 
the bounds of Christendom ; people who had never 
been baptized, and had never learned to wear Eng- 
lish garments, " naked slaves of the devil," as one 
of the early Virginia clergymen described them. 
To the benevolent desire of Englishmen for the 
deliverance of the savages from devil-worship and 
semi-nudity, there was added the natural wish for 
ecclesiastical extension. The separation of Eng- 
land from the Roman hierarchy had been a blow 
to the aspiration for an unattainable catholicity 
cherished in one form or another by Christian 
ecclesiastics of almost every school. It was not 
possible that the great men who were leaders of 
the English church in the reigns of Elizabeth and 
James should be content with the narrow limits of 
" the little English paddock," while Spanish con- 
querors and missionary priests were winning for 
the Roman communion a new and vast dominion 
in America. English ecclesiastics felt keenly the 
reproach made against them by the Roman Cath- 
olics that they were not " converters of infidels." 

Perhaps the earliest of all Anglican mission- 
aries was Robert Hunt, the first minister in Vir- 
ginia, a light shining in a dark place indeed. He 
bore with unfaltering courage and a sweet-hearted 
patience rarely equaled in the history of martyr- 
dom the accumulating miseries of Jamestowai, until 
he also perished in the general mortality. His 
nobleness of spirit softened the detestable rivalries 
of the early leaders. The most active and influen- 



The Procession of Motives. 



91 



tial writers in favor of colonization were clergy- 
men such as Hakluyt, S3'monds, Purchas, and 
Crashaw. Other clergymen, following in the foot- 
steps of Hunt, risked life itself in the Virginia col- 
ony, while devout laymen spent their money in its 
behalf. Thus did Anglican zeal further a colo- 
nization that, by a curious perversity of outcome, 
resulted in founding a nation of dissenters. 

IX. 

In the great hall of the house of Nicholas Fer- 
rar, a London merchant, the courts or meetings of 
the Virginia Company were held for years. The 
two sons of this Nicholas Ferrar, John and Nicho- 
las, served in turn as deputy governors of the Vir- 
ginia Company. This pious Ferrar family, as it 
became influential, lent to the scheme of colonizing 
Virginia something of the air of a project for prop- 
agating the gospel. Nicholas, the father, gave 
money for the education of infidels in Virginia. A 
school was founded there by the gifts of the pious, 
and rewards were given to those colonists who 
would educate Indian children in their families. 
After the younger Nicholas, who was a man of 
remarkable zeal and activity, tinged with a roman- 
tic enthusiasm, became deputy in 1622, the pro- 
duction of silk and wine and iron and the educa- 
ting of Indians in Christianity traveled on abreast. 
A college was proposed, for which an endowment 
of thirteen hundred pounds was collected, and to 
which a valuable library was bequeathed by a set- 



Chap. III. 



The 
Ferrars. 



92 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Later His- 
tory of the 
Ferrars. 



tier. Practical men grumbled at the prematurity 
of all this, and complained of those in charge 
that "they spent Michaelmas rent in mid-summer 
moone." The governor of the colony, honest Sir 
Francis Wyatt, wished that " little Mr. Ferrar 
were in Virginia, where he might add to his zeal 
a knowledge of the country." 

The horrible massacre of March, 1622, made the 
Indian question something other than the Ferrars 
saw it. All schemes for educating the savages 
were obliterated in a day. The only thought after 
this was how to put the savages to death, old and 
young, men and women, more often by foul means 
than by fair. The settlers even emulated, if they 
did not surpass, the treachery of the Indians. 
With the dissolution of the company by quo tvar- 
raiito proceedings in 1624 the government of the 
colony passed to the Crown, and the Ferrars had 
no more to do with Virs^inia. 



The later career of Nicholas Ferrar the young- 
er, though without direct relation to colonization, 
throw^s light on the age of colony beginnings. 
Rejecting the offer of a rich bride, he bought for 
his mother, now a widow, the manor lordship of 
Little Gidding, in Huntingdonshire, and took the 
entire Ferrar family, including his brother and his 
sister with eighteen children, into religious retire- 
ment. Here this half-domestic, half-monastic com- 
munity gave alms to the poor, illuminated manu- 



The Procession of Motives. 



93 



scripts of the Bible, and worshiped in its little 
chapel with genuflections and other observances 
that procured for it the nickname of the " Prot- 
estant Nunnery," and brought down upon it the 
pious fury of the Puritans. Nicholas Ferrar, who 
had taken deacon's orders, was the real head of 
the communit3\ He prepared at Little Gidding 
what is perhaps the earliest English monatesseron 
of the four gospels. By means of relays of wor- 
shipers the Ferrars kept their devotions always 
in progress. The entire Psalter was chanted anti- 
phonally during each twenty-four hours. Those 
whose turn it was to keep vigil were wont to leave 
a candle at the door of Nicholas and to wish him 
good-morrow at one o'clock in the morning, at 
which hour he was accustomed to rise and begin 
the exercises of the day. The strength of this 
belated mediaeval saint gave way under a disci- 
pline so austere, and he died in 1637. Little Gid- 
ding, with its " fair grove and sweet walks let- 
ticed and gardened on both sides," was devastated 
a few years later by the counter-zeal of the Puri- 
tans, who showed an especial indignation against 
the organ, which they broke into pieces to light 
fires for roasting the sheep of the Ferrars. Behold 
an epitome of the first half of the seventeenth cen- 
tury — its idealism in affairs, and its M'ar to the 
death of opposing ideals in religion ! 

In the very years during which the Ferrars 
were most active on behalf of Virginia the earliest 
Puritan movement toward America set in. The 



Chap. III. 



Peckard's 

Life of N. 

Ferrar. 

Arminian 

Nunnery 

164 1. 

Heame's 

Langtoft's 

Chronicle, 

App. to 

Pref., cix. 



Advent of 
Puritan- 
ism. 



94 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note I, 
page 74. 



attenuated medisevalism of the Ferrars did not lack 
a certain refined beauty, but it was hardly suited 
to the rough work of hewing a road along which 
civilization might march into a savage wilderness. 
The Puritans, with their robust contempt for aes- 
thetic considerations— making firewood of organs 
with delight, and feasting without scruple on the 
sheep of those whom they esteemed idolaters — 
were much the fitter to be champions against the 
American Canaanites. 

Elucidations. 

Two of the chapter heads to Hakluyt's Westerne Planting, 
printed in 2d Maine Historical Collections, ii, sufficiently indicate 
the views prevailing at the time : 

"V. That this voyadge will be a greate bridle to the Indies 
of the Kinge of Spaine, and a meane that wee may arreste at our 
pleasure for the space of tenne weekes or three monethes every 
yere, one or two hundred saile of his subjectes Shippes at the 
fysshinge in Newfounde lande. 

" VI. That the mischefe that the Indian threasure wroughte 
in time of Charles the late Emperor, father to the Spanishe Kinge, 
is to be had in consideration of the Queens moste excellent Ma- 
jestic, least the contynuall comynge of the like threasure from 
thence to his sonne worke the unrecoverable annoye of this realme, 
wherof already wee have had very dangerous experience." 

The heading of the first chapter should be added : " I. That 
this westerne discoverie will be greately for thinlargemente of the 
gospell of Christe whereunto the princes of the refourmed relligion 
are chefely bounde, amongst whome her Majestic ys principall." 

It would be foreign to the purpose of the present work to tell 
the story of Spanish jealousy of Virginia, and of the diplomatic 
intrigues for the overthrow of the colony. See documents in Mr. 
Alexander Brown's Genesis of the United States. One can not 
but regret that Mr. Brown did not give also the original of his 
Spanish papers ; no translation is adequate to the use of the 
historian. 



TJie Procession of Motives. 



95 



This method was recommended to the colonists as late as 
1753 in Pullein's Culture of Silk for the Use of the American 
Colonies, and it had probably long prevailed on the continent of 
Europe. 

The authorities on the early efforts to raise silk, in addition to 
those cited in the text and the margin, are too numerous to find 
place here. The most valuable of all is, of course, the copy of 
the Records of the Virginia Company after April, 1619, in the 
Library of Congress, passim. See, for example, under date of 
December 13, 1620, and June 11, 1621. See also A Declaration 
of Virginia, 1620, and Purchas, pp. 1 777-1 787, Hamor's True 
Discourse, Smith's General History, Book II, Anderson's Com- 
merce under 1620, and various state papers abstracted by Sains- 
bury, with Sainsbury's preface to the first volume of his Calendar, 
and Hening, passim. The reader is also referred to Mr. Bruce's 
Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century, issued 
as these pages are passing into the hands of the printer. The 
wildness of some of the proposals for the production of Virginia 
silk in the Commonwealth period is almost surpassed by other 
projects of the time. In Virginia Richly Valued, 1650, perfume 
was to be extracted from the muskrat, and the James River 
sturgeon were to be domesticated. Fishes may be "unwilded," 
says the author. Besides feeding silkworms, the Indians were to 
be used in pearl fisheries in Virginia waters. Wyckoff on Silk 
Manufacture, Tenth Census, says that experimental silkworms 
had been taken to Mexico by the Spaniards in 1531, without any 
permanent results. 

Even in Elizabeth's time efforts had been made to procure 
naval stores without the intervention of foreign merchants. As 
early as 1 583, Carlisle, who was son-in-law to Secretary Walsing- 
ham, had subscribed a thousand pounds toward an American 
colony, which it was urged would buy English woolens, take off 
idle and burdensome people, and, among other things, produce 
naval stores. In 1601 Ralegh had protested eloquently against 
the act to compel Englishmen to sow hemp. " Rather let every 
man use his ground to that which it is most fit for," he said. 
Edwards, Life of Ralegh, p. 272. 

V/hy Germans were sent it is hard to say, as glass was made 
in England as early as 1557. Glass was produced in Virginia, 
according to Strachey, who says : " Although the country wants 
not Salsodiack enough to make glasse of, and of which we have 



Chap. III. 

Note 2, 
page 78. 



Note 3, 
page 79. 



Note 4, 
page 82. 



Note 5, 
page 83. 



96 



Rise of the First Colony. 



Book I. 



Note 6, 
page 83. 



Note 7, 
page 84. 



Note 8, 
page 85. 



made some stoore in a goodly howse sett up for the same pur- 
pose, with all offices and furnases thereto belonging, a little 
without the island, where Jamestown now stands." History of 
Travaile into Virginnia Brittannia, p. 71. The house appears to 
have been standing and in operation in 1624. Calendar of Colo- 
nial Documents, January 30, February 16, and number 20, pp. 
38, 39- 

Purchas, p. 1777, says that one hundred and fifty persons 
were sent over two years earlier to set up three iron works, but 
the statement seems hardly credible. In the midst of the misery 
following the massacre of 1622, and notwithstanding the immi- 
nent probability of the overthrow of the company, which was 
already impoverished, some of the adventurers or shareholders 
sent nine men to Virginia to try a different method of making 
iron from the one that had previously been used. Letter of 
August 6, 1623, in Manuscript Book of Instructions in Library of 
Congress, fol. 120. Having " failed to effect " the making of iron 
" by those great wayes which we have formerly attempted," the 
undiscouraged visionaries " most gladly embraced this more 
facile project " of making iron " by bloom," but with a like result, 
of course. 

The raising of tobacco in Virginia was one of the earliest 
projects entertained. " We can send . . . tobacco after a yeare 
or two, five thousand pounds a yeare." Description of the 
Now-discovered river and Country of Virginia, with the Likly- 
hood of ensuing Ritches by England's Ayd and Industry, May 
21, 1607. Public Record Office, printed in Transactions of the 
American Antiquarian Society, iv, 59, 62. The paper is sup- 
posed to be from the pen of Captain Gabriel Archer. 

In 1604 the king had, by a royal commission addressed to 
" our treasurer of England," arbitrarily raised the duty on tobacco 
from twopence a pound to six shillings tenpence. He was prob- 
ably moved to make this surprising change by his antipathy to 
tobacco ; but by increasing the profits of the farmers of customs 
and monopolists of tobacco, he no doubt contributed to that 
abandonment of Virginia to tobacco raising which seemed to him 
so lamentable. The use of Spanish tobacco in England was 
general before that from Virginia began to take its placg. Bar- 
nabee Rich says, in 1614 : " I have heard it tolde that now very 
lately there hath bin a cathologue taken of all those new erected 
houses that have set vppe that trade of selling tobacco in Lon- 



TJie Procession of Motives. 



97 



don, ande neare about London, and if a man may beleeue what 
is confidently reported, there are found to be vpward of 7000 
houses that doth Hue by that trade." He says such shops were 
"almost in euery lane and in euery by-corner round about Lon- 
don," The Honestie of this Age, p. 30. 

The MS. records of the Virginia Company and the State 
papers relating to Virginia in the Public Record Office, London, 
are the most important authorities on the subjects treated in the 
text. On the commodities attempted at the outset. Manuscript 
Book of Instructions, Library of Congress, the first volume of 
Hening's Statutes, /a.y^/;«, and Purchas, pp. 1 777-1 786, passim. 
On the inferiority of the Indian tobacco, see Strachey, p, 121. 

Peckard's Life of Ferrar supplies many of the particulars in 
this section. The Records of the Virginia Company and other 
original authorities do not sustain all of Peckard's statements. 
The author's view is evidently distorted by biographer's myopia. 
He often seems to depend on tradition, but in some passages his 
touch is more sure, and he writes like a man who has documents 
before him. Arthur Woodnoth's Short Collection of the Most 
Remarkable Passages from the Originall to the Dissolution of the 
Virginia Company is of great value. It is a scarce tract, which I 
met first in the White-Kennett Libraiy, in the rooms of the Soci- 
ety for the Propagation of the Gospel. It is also in the British 
Museum, Harvard College, and the Library of Congress. It is 
to be taken with discrimination, but the view of the inner work- 
ings of court intrigue as it affected Virginia is so fresh and de- 
tailed that it would be a pity to miss its information. It was 
printed in 165 1. There is a brief sketch of the life of Sandys in 
Brown's Genesis of the United States, ii, 993. 

Hakluyt's Discourse concerneing Westerne Planting, printed 
first in the Maine Historical Collections, second series, vol. ii, 
page II. "And this enterprise the princes of religion (amonge 
whome her Majestic ys principall) oughte the rather to take in 
hande because papists confirme themselves and drawe other to 
theire side shewinge that they are the true Catholicke churche 
because they have bene the onely converters of many millions of 
infidells. Yea, I myself have bene demanded of them how many 
infidells have bene by us converted," 



Chap. III. 



Note 9, 
page 86. 



Note 10, 
page 89. 



Note II, 
page 90. 



BOOK II. 

THE PURITAN MIGRATION. 



Book IT. 



Love of 
display in 
Eliza- 
beth's 
time. 



CHAPTER THE FIRST. 
RISE AND DEVELOPMENT OF PURITANISM. 



Not religious disputants only, but the world in 
general, exaggerated the importance of vestments 
and ceremonies in the reign of Elizabeth. The 
love of formality and display that characterized 
the Renascence was then at its height. It was a 
time of pomps and royal progresses. Great his- 
toric characters went about dressed like perform- 
ers in a show. Some of the queen's gowns were 
adorned with jewels on every available inch of 
space. These bespangled robes were draped over 
vast farthingales, which spread out like tables on 
which her arms might rest, and her appearance 
when thus attired has been compared to that of 
an Oriental idol. Her courtiers and statesmen 
were equally fond of dazzling the spectator. 
Ralegh wore a pendent jewel on his hat feather, 
and the value of the gems on his shoes was esti- 
mated at six thousand six hundred pieces of gold. 

The love of pomp was not confined to the court ; 

98 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



99 



every nobleman and country gentleman kept his 
house filled with idle serving men, the sons of 
neighboring gentlemen or yeomen, whose use was 
to " grace the halls " of their patron by their at- 
tendance and to give dignity to his hospitality. 
High sheriffs and other officials performed their 
functions with thirty or forty men in livery at 
their heels, even borrowing the retainers of their 
friends to lend state to their office. Edward VI 
set out upon a progress in 155 1 with a train of 
four thousand mounted men. These were noble- 
men and gentlemen with their retainers. He was 
obliged to dismiss all but a hundred and fifty of 
this vast army of display lest it should " eat up 
the country." The gorgeous progresses of Eliza- 
beth are too well known to need description. A 
painting of the time shows her to us in the act of 
making a friendly call on her cousin-german. Lord 
Hunsdon. She is sitting under a canopy, and is 
borne on the shoulders of men and attended by a 
brilliant train of lords and ladies on foot. It was 
truer in the days of Shakespeare than it has been 
since that " all the world's a stage, and all the men 
and women merely players." 

A passionate love of the theater was inevitable 
in such a time. The best poetry then took a dra- 
matic form ; even history was taught from the 
stage ; and satire and polemics felt the attraction 
and were often put into imaginary dialogues. It 
was Shakespeare's good fortune that he happened 
to live among a people fond of show and in an 



Chap. I. 



Note I. 



Machyn's 
Diary, 324, 
note. 



The age 
of the 
drama. 



lOO 



The Puritayi Mis:ratio7i. 



Book II. 



Display in 
dress. 



Peckard's 
Life of 
Ferrar. 



Stubbes, 
Anatomie 
of Abuses, 
passim. 



Note 2. 



age dramatic as well as poetic to its very core. 
Genius is nourished by sympathy, and supremely 
great performance is rendered possible only by the 
rare coincidence of the great man and a fitting 
environment. 

Dress signified more to the men of the time of 
Elizabeth and James than it is easy for us moderns 
to imagine. Greatness declared itself by external 
display. The son of a rich merchant when he re- 
turned from his travels decked himself in gor- 
geous apparel, and formally made his appearance 
on the Exchange like a butterfly newly emerged. 
It was thus that his parents brought the young 
man out in the world. A sum equal in purchas- 
ing power to several thousand dollars in our time 
is said to have been spent on one pair of trunk 
hose. Men of the lowest ranks, desirous of appear- 
ing more than the}^ were, impoverished themselves 
in buying expensive hats and hose ; and it is re- 
corded that women suffering for the necessaries of 
life sometimes contrived to adorn themselves with 
velvet. For the very reason that so much impor- 
tance was attached to dress, laws were made to 
repress inappropriate display in people of lower 
rank. Even the severe Puritan moralists did not 
object to the pomp of the great, but to the extrava- 
gant imitation of it by those who had no right to 
such ostentation. It was with difficulty that men 
could conceive of greatness without display. To 
refuse a bishop his vestments was to abate some- 
thing of his lofty rank. 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



lOI 



II. 

Along with a love for external show w^ent a 
scrupulous observance of decorous and often pomp- 
ous ceremonies. Englishmen in the sixteenth and 
the early part of the seventeenth century never 
omitted to observe proper formality, no matter 
how dire the emergency. One may see this exem- 
plified by reverting to some of the earliest events 
in American history. When Gates arrived at 
Jamestown near the close of the "starving time," 
he found only the gaunt ghosts of men clamoring 
to be taken from the scene of so many horrible 
miseries. Instead of giving immediate attention 
to the sufferings of the people, he caused the little 
church bell to be rung. Such of the inhabitants 
as could drag themselves out of their huts repaired 
once more to the now ruined and unfrequented 
church with its roof of sedge and earth supported 
by timbers set in crotches. Here the newly ar- 
rived chaplain offered a sorrowful prayer, and then 
George Percy, the retiring governor, delivered 
up his authority to Sir Thomas Gates, who thus 
found himself in due and proper form installed 
governor of death, famine, and desperation. When 
Gates abandoned the wrecked town with his starv- 
ing company he fired a " peale of small shott," in 
order not to be wanting in respect for a royal fort ; 
and when De la Warr arrived, a few days later, he 
made his landing with still greater pomp than that 
of Gates. There was a flourish of trumpets on 



Chap. I. 



Observ- 
ance of 
ceremo- 
nies. 



Compare 
supra, 
p. 41. 



102 



TJie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Strachey, 
in Purchas, 
iv, 17-54. 



Dela 

Warr's let- 
ter, in 
Strachey's 
Virginia, 
p. xxix. 



Formality 
at Plym- 
outh. 



shipboard before he struck sail in front of James- 
town. A gentleman of his party bore the colors of 
the governor before him. The governor's first act 
when he set foot on American soil was to fall on 
his knees and offer a long, silent prayer, which was 
probably sincere though theatrical, after the man- 
ner of the age. He rose at length and marched up 
into the ruined town. As he passed into the stock- 
ade by the water gate, which was shabbily off its 
hinges, the color bearer dropped down before him 
and allowed the colors to fall at the feet of his 
lordship, who proceeded to the tumble -down 
chapel, under the earthen roof of which the au- 
thority over the colony was duly transferred to his 
hands with such solemnities as were thought proper. 
Whenever Lord De la Warr went to church at 
Jamestown he was attended by the councilors, cap- 
tains, and gentlemen, and guarded by fifty men 
with halberds, wearing De la Warr's livery of 
showy red cloaks. The governor's seat was a 
chair covered v/ith green velvet. It was in the 
choir of the now reconstructed little church, and a 
velvet cushion lay on the table before him to en- 
able him to worship his Maker in a manner becom- 
ing the dignity of a great lord over a howling wil- 
derness. More than a quarter of the able-bodied 
men in Virginia were needed to get the governor 
to church and back again aboard the ship where 
he dwelt. 

Even at a later date in the rather hungry little 
Pilgrim colony at Plymouth almost as much cere- 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



103 



mony was observed, though the people were ex- 
treme Puritans without rank. At beat of drum on 
Sunday morning the men came to Captain vStand- 
ish's door with their cloaks on, each bearing a mus- 
ket or matchlock. They proceeded to church three 
abreast, led by a sergeant. In the rear walked the 
governor, in a long robe. On his right was Elder 
Brewster, wearing a cloak. On the governor's left 
was Captain Miles Standish, who also wore a cloak 
and side arms, and carried a small cane as a sort 
of baton of authority perhaps. Thus " they march 
in good order, and each sets his arms down near 
him." 

It was only in an age such as this that resistance 
to the celebration of rites and the observance of 
forms could be made a capital article of faith by the 
Puritan, and later by the Quaker. The wearing of 
a surplice, the propriety of doffing the hat on cer- 
tain occasions, was a matter for scruple and violent 
debate, for the grave consideration of the lawgiver 
and magistrate, and for severe penalties. 

III. 

In the brief Protestant reign of Edward VI 
there were those who objected to "the vest- 
ments," and one may even find what were after- 
ward called Puritan opinions condemned among 
current errors in the twenty-eighth year of Henry 
VIII; but Puritanism — as a party protest against 
pomp and ceremonialism in religious worship — 
had its origin in the persecution of Queen Mary's 



Chap. 1. 



De Rasi- 
eres's 
letter, 
2d N. Y. 
Hist. Coll., 
ii. 352. 



Puritan- 
ism an 
outgrowth 
of the 
time. 



Origin of 
the Puri- 
tan move- 
ment. 

Fuller's 
Ch. Hist., 
book V, 
sec. iv, 
27, 28. 

^5^- 



104 



TJie Puritan Mis;ration. 



Book II. 



A. D. J553. 

The Eng- 
lish exiles. 



Outbreak 
of dissen- 
sion. 



time. The English Protestants who fled from that 
fiery ordeal found refuge chiefly in Protestant cit- 
ies of the Continent. Strasburg, Frankfort, Basel, 
Zurich, and Geneva were the places to which these 
English exiles mainly resorted. Zurich and Stras- 
burg became cities of refuge for many of those 
who were to become leaders of the Anglican or 
Conservative party, while others who tended to 
what were afterward called Puritan views went 
sooner or later to Geneva, where Calvin was the 
dominant influence. 

In the cities in which they found safety the 
exiles organized English churches. More remark- 
able religious communities were never gathered 
into single congregations. Five bishops and five 
deans of the English Church, and more than fifty 
eminent doctors of divinity, with younger men who 
were destined to play a leading part in the future, 
were comprised in these little churches. Such 
communities soon became centers of. animated dis- 
cussion and debate. 

During the preceding reign of King Edward 
VI, English Protestantism had been forced into 
many compromises within itself. No form of re- 
ligious life can become national without exactin* 
of its advocates of differing shades of opinion many 
sacrifices for the sake of unity ; but now that the 
leaders of English Protestantism were in exile they 
found themselves in a measure freed from motives 
of policy and with leisure to develop and apply 
their theories. A passion for the ideal thus suddenly 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



105 



unchained easily becomes rampant. There sprang 
up swiftly a dispute between the church in Stras- 
burg and the church in Frankfort on matters of 
government. The reformatory spirit is rarely con- 
ciliatory, and in its excess and overflow it is wont to 
be pragmatic and impertinent. Some of the reform- 
ers of Strasburg felt bound to go over to Frankfort 
and re-reform the reformed English church there ; 
and the little English community in Frankfort was 
soon torn asunder between the followers of Rich- 
ard Cox and those of John Knox — the same who 
was afterward so famous in the Scottish refor- 
mation. 

This dispute in Frankfort between the Coxans 
and the Knoxans, as they were called, had all the 
characteristics that render church quarrels odious. 
One finds in it the bitterness of slanderous vio- 
lence — the little deceptions and unmanly treacher- 
ies that characterize such debates and disclose the 
sorry threadbareness of human saintship even in 
exiles and martyrs for conscience' sake. But, petty 
as were these squabbles at Frankfort, they pro- 
duced results of the first magnitude. Small things 
change the whole course of history when they lie 
near the fountain head of a great current. From 
the conflicting factions in the church of the exiles 
at Frankfort were evolved the opposing parties 
that were to give character to English Protestant- 
ism, and to modify profoundly the history of Eng- 
land and as profoundly the history of the United 
States. 



Chap. I. 



Character 
of the de- 
bates at 
Frankfort. 



io6 



TJie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 

The rise of 
the two 
great par- 
ties. 



Note 3. 



A purified 
ritual. 



Note 4. 



In the contentions of the English at Frankfort, 
resulting- now in the exiling from the city of one 
beaten minority and now in the departure of an- 
other, and in the driving away of one leading dis- 
putant after another, there appeared at length the 
features of the two great parties of English Protes- 
tantism face to face for the first time. One of these 
parties tried to hold all of antique ritual that the 
Protestant conscience could be made to bear, in- 
sisted upon the superior authority of the clergy, 
and sought to disturb as little as possible the ancient 
order of the English church. On the other hand, 
in the rapid changes produced by the Frankfort 
contentions, the tendency of the ultra wing of the 
Protestants to the notion of a local and independent 
church and to a democratic church government 
was already apparent. Even the peculiarity of 
two ministers presiding over one church, which 
was cherished later in New England, appeared 
among the English at Frankfort and Geneva at this 
time. 

While attempting to mediate between the par- 
ties at Frankfort, Calvin expressed his preference 
for a ritual of greater purity than that established 
by the English Prayer Book of King Edward's time. 
Extreme Protestants rallied round this ideal of a 
liturgy purified of human tradition. It was some 
years later, after the Frankfort church had been 
dissolved and the exiles had returned to England, 
that this party came to be known by the name 
of Puritan — that is, a party not so much bent on 



Rise and Development of Piiritajiisvi. 



107 



purity of conduct as on purifying Protestant wor- 
ship from mediaeval forms. 

After the death of Mary and the accession of 
Elizabeth the English Protestants returned to their 
own country. The two great parties that were to 
divide the English church had already begun to 
crystallize. Those who had settled at Strasburg 
and Zurich came back hoping to re-establish the 
Anglican Church on the conservative basis of the 
Pra3'er Book of Edward VI. Those who returned 
from Basel and Geneva had caught the spirit of 
the Calvinistic churches, and wished to push the 
reformation to a more logical extreme ; while the 
Frankfort church, or what remained of it, had been 
storm-driven well-nigh to a theory of congrega- 
tional independence in church government. 

The petty squabbles of the English exiles, trans- 
planted to England, grew into bitter feuds and 
brought forth persecutions and political struggles. 
The settlement of New England, the battles of 
Marston Moor and Naseby, the temporary over- 
throw of the English monarchy, the growth of non- 
conformity, the modification of the English Con- 
stitution and of all English life, were germinally 
present in the differences between the exiles at 
Zurich and those at Geneva, and in the squabbles 
of Cox and Knox, of Whithead and Home at 
Frankfort-on-the-Main about gowns and litanies and 
the authority of the priest. It is not often that a 
great historical movement can be traced through a 
single rill to its rise at the fountain head. 



Chap, I. 



Return of 
the exiles, 
1558. 



Results. 



io8 



TJie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



The Puri- 
tan debate. 



Certayne 
Qvestions 
concerning 
silk or 
wool in 
the high 
priest's 
ephod, 
1605. 



IV. 

The theological debates that fill so large a 
place in the history of the first half of the six- 
teenth century in Europe were mainly concerned 
with speculative dogmas. However futile contro- 
versies may seem that seek to reduce to formulas 
the relations between God and man, they have at 
least a topical dignity. But the debates about cer- 
emonies and vestments which the exiles brought 
back to England from the Continent, and which 
held first place there during the reign of Elizabeth 
and James, were bitter without being serious. A 
life-and-death struggle concerning the wearing of 
" white surplices " or the making of the sign of 
the cross in baptism can not but seem frivolous to 
the modern mind. Learned scholars like Brough- 
ton and Ainsworth thought it not beneath them to 
write tractates discussing the material of which 
the ephod of a Jewish high priest was made. It 
was learnedly demonstrated that the ephod was 
of silk, and there were sober essays on the linsey- 
woolsey side of that controversy. To the fine- 
spun mind of that time the character of the Jewish 
ephod was thought to settle the propriety of the 
Christian surplice. To the modern reader the 
whole debate about vestments and liturgies would 
be amusing if it were not so tedious. It is nec- 
essary to steady one's judgment of that age by 
remembering that deeper things sometimes lay 
concealed under these disputes regarding the con- 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



109 



temptible mint and cumin of ecclesiasticism. Puri- 
tanism at its rise was an effort to escape from 
formalism, the outgrowth of an aspiration for 
greater spirituality in worship ; but it gradually 
passed into an opposite formalism as rigid as that 
from which it had escaped. 

It was in vain that Elizabeth tried to compel 
uniformity. The difference between the radical 
and the conservative is constitutional, and is mani- 
fest in every period of agitation. Neither the me- 
diation of moderate men nor the compulsion of 
authority can bring these two sempiternal divisions 
of the human i-ace into asrreement. The conserva- 
tive English churchman limited his Protestantism 
to the rejection of the pope's authority, and to cer- 
tain moderate reforms in church government and 
ritual. He shuddered with alarm at every pro- 
posal to reconstruct religious institutions which 
were moss-srrown with ancient sentiment. The 
extreme Puritan, on the other hand, went about 
his work in the spirit of a Jehu. He saved all his 
reverence for the precepts of the Bible, now be- 
coming common in the vulgar tongue. He ap- 
plied biblical phraseology to the affairs of life in a 
way that would have been impossible had he pos- 
sessed any sense of humor. He felt himself im- 
pelled by the call of God to carry out in England 
the changes that had taken place in the Calvinistic 
churches of the Continent, and to go even further. 
He vv^ould have no surplices, no sign of the cross, 
no liturgy, no church holy days. Away with these 



Chap. I. 



Uniform- 
ity not 
possible. 



no 



The Puritan Mip^ration. 



Book II. 



Growth of 

party 

spirit. 



Puritan- 
ism the 
party of 
opposi- 
tion. 



rags of Antichrist, was his cry. Let us get back 
to the simplicity of the primitive ages. The An- 
glican, on the other hand, felt himself an English- 
man above all, and without a stately liturgy, great 
bishops in square caps and lawn sleeves, Christmas 
feasts, solemn Good Fridays, and joyous Rasters, 
there would have remained for him no merry 
England. 



The party line between Anglican and Puritan 
was not at once sharply drawn. It was only after 
debates growing ever more acrimonious, after per- 
secutions and numberless exasperations, that the 
parties in the Church of England fell into well- 
defined and hostile camps. If there had been some 
relaxation of the requirements of uniformity, if a 
conciliatory policy had been pursued by the gov- 
ernment, the ultimate division might have been 
postponed until party spirit had cooled ; but in 
that day blows took the place of words, and words 
had the force of blows. The queen herself could 
write to a bishop who scrupled to do what she de- 
sired, " By God, I will unfrock you ! " and modera- 
tion in debate was not to be expected from lesser 
folk. 

When the reformer has warmed to his work he 
looks about him for new abuses to fall upon. The 
dominant discontent of any age is prone to spread 
its wings over other grievances, and feebler move- 
ments seek shelter from the strong. Puritanism 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



I II 



no doubt gathered momentum from the wide- 
spread agrarian and industrial disturbance in this 
and the preceding reigns. The profit from sheep- 
raising had induced many manor lords to inclose 
the wastes on which the peasants had pastured 
their cattle for ages. The humble copy-hold ten- 
ant, having no longer grass for his cows or mast 
for his pigs, was driven to distress by agricultural 
progress. In some cases even the common fields, 
cultivated in allotments from ancient times by the 
members of the village communities, first as serfs 
and later as tenants, were turned into sheepwalks, 
and hamlets of tenants' cottages were torn down 
to make room for more profitable occupants of the 
soil. The worst offenders were the greedy court- 
iers who had secured the estates of the English 
monasteries. Workmen ruined by the dissolution 
of the guilds were added to the ranks of the un- 
happy. All the discontent begotten of these tran- 
sitions from medieval life tended to strengthen the 
leading opposition — and that leading opposition 
was Puritanism. 

VI. 

Puritanism also progressively widened its field 
of protest. Beliefs that Protestants rejected were 
symbolized by the vestments of bishop and clergy. 
Advanced Protestants insisted that the shadows 
should be banished with the substance, that the 
symbol should disappear with the dogma. We 
have seen that in Frankfort the inchoate Puritan 



Chap. I. 



Note 5. 



Widening 
the field of 
protest. 



112 



TJie Puritan Misrration. 



Book II. 



Puritan- 
ism be- 
comes dog- 
matic. 



Note 6. 



party wished to abolish the litany and purge the 
service book of all the remains of the old religion. 
This controversy raged in England, and the Puri- 
tan side did not at first lack support even among 
the bishops. But Elizabeth, the real founder of 
Anglicanism, molded the church to her will, put- 
ting down Catholics and Puritans with a hard 
hand. The more advanced of the party came at 
length to believe that all " stinted " prayers " read 
out of a book " were contrary to the purity and 
simplicity of Christian worship. The hostilit}^ of 
the bishops to that which the Puritans believed to 
be the cause of God no doubt helped to convince 
the persecuted party that the episcopal office itself 
was contrary to Scripture. 

Most of the Puritans of Elizabeth's time, under 
the lead of the great Cartwright, became Presbyte- 
rian in theory and sought to assimilate the Church 
of England to the Calvinistic churches of the Con- 
tinent, holding that theirs was the very order pre- 
scribed by the apostles. Another but much smaller 
division of the Puritans tended toward independ- 
enc}--, finding in the New Testament a system dif- 
ferent from that of Cartwright. Both the Pres- 
byterians and those who held to local church 
government wished to see their own system estab- 
lished by law. Neither faction thought of toler- 
ating Anglican practices if the Anglicans could be 
put down. The notion of a state church with pre- 
scribed forms of worship enforced by law was too 
deeply imbedded in the English mind to be easily 



Rise and Developme7it of Puritanism. 



113 



got rid of, and the spirit of persecution pervaded 
every party, Catholic or Protestant. Every one 
was sure that divine authority was on his side, and 
that human authority ought to be. 

VII. 

A corresponding change began to take place 
in the Episcopal party. The earlier defenders of 
Elizabeth's establishment argued, somewhat as 
Hooker did later, that the "practice of the apos- 
tles " was not an " invariable rule or law to suc- 
ceeding ages, because they acted according to the 
circumstances of the church in its infant and perse- 
cuted state." Episcopal government they held to 
be allowable, and maintained the attitude of prudent 
men who justify their compromise with history 
and the exigency of the time, and advocate, above 
all, submission to civil authority. But the tend- 
ency of party division is to push both sides to 
more positive ground. There arose in the last 
years of Elizabeth a school of High-churchmen 
led by Bancroft, afterward primate, who turned 
away from Hooker's moderation and assumed a 
more aggressive attitude. Like the Presbyteri- 
ans and the Independents and the Catholics, these 
in turn maintained that their favorite system of 
church economy was warranted by divine author- 
ity, and that all others were excluded. 

When the High-church leaders had reached 
the dogmatic assertion of apostolic succession and 
a divinely appointed episcopal form of government 
9 



Chap. I. 



Anglican- 
ism be- 
comes 
dogmatic. 



Failure of 
Eliza- 
beth's 
policy. 



114 



TJic Puritaji migration. 



Book II. 



Bitterness 
of the de- 
bate. 



The Mar- 
prelate 
tracts. 

1588. 



as essentials of a Christian church, the fissure be- 
tween the two ecclesiastical parties in England 
was complete. Each had settled itself upon a sup- 
posed divine authority ; each regarded the other 
as teaching a theory contrary to the divine plan. 
Elizabeth's policy of repression had produced a 
certain organic uniformity, but the civil war of the 
seventeenth century was its ultimate result. 

VIII. 

The controversy between the two Protestant 
parties naturally grew more bitter as time went on. 
The silencing of ministers, the Fleet Prison, the 
inquisitorial Ecclesiastical Commission, and other 
such unanswerable arguments did not sweeten the 
temper of the Puritans. The bitterness of the con- 
troversy reached its greatest intensity in 1588, when 
there appeared a succession of anonymous tracts, 
most of them signed Martin Marprelate. They 
seem to have been written mainly by the same 
hand, but their authorship has been a matter of 
debate to this day. 

The sensation produced by these violent assaults 
is hardly conceivable now. There were no news- 
papers then, and there was but little popular lit- 
erature. Here were little books printed no one 
knew where, written by no one knew whom, 
concerning a religious controversy of universal 
interest. They were couched in the phrase of the 
street, in the very slang and cant of the populace, 
and were violent and abusive, sometimes descend- 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



115 



ing to sheer blackguardism. Marprelate went 
gunning for large game ; his deadliest abuse he let 
fly as from a blunderbuss at the very heads of the 
English church. The Dean of Salisbury he calls 
" Doctor of Diviltrie and Deane of Sarum." It 
was the first time in the history of polemics that 
any one had addressed a high dignitary of the 
church with such irreverent titles as "You grosse 
beaste ! " " You block, you ! " Sometimes Martin 
bends his knees with mock reverence, as when he 
calls the clergy "right poysond, persecuting and 
terrible priests." He blurts out epithets against 
" the sinful, the unlawful, the broken, the unnatural, 
false, and bastardly governours of the church ; to 
wit, archbishops and bishops " ; and addresses them 
as " you enemies to the state, you traytors to God 
and his worde, you Mar-prince, Mar-land, ]Mar-ma- 
gestrate. Mar-church, and Mar-commonwealth." 
The spice of the books, that which gave them their 
popularity, was doubtless their rollicking impu- 
dence. " Wo — ho, now. Brother London ! " he cries 
to the Bishop of London. " Go to, you Asse!" is a 
kind of kennel eloquence relished by the populace. 
Martin seems even to giggle and sneer and hiss in 
type in such expressions as " tse, tse, tse." 

The little books went everywhere. The Bishop 
of Winchester sadly confessed that these " slander- 
ous pamphlets, freshe from the presse," were " in 
men's hands and bosoms commonly." The queen 
and courtiers read them, and students had nothing 
better to laugh at. Who will not stop in the street 



Chap. I. 



The Mar- 
prelate 
tracts in 
Lenox 
Library, 



An Ad- 
monition to 
the People 
of Eng- 
land, p. 25. 



ii6 



The Puritati Mio;ration. 



Book II. 



'^ Nuga An- 
tiquae, ii, 
89, 90. 



Lenox Col- 
lection, 
N. Y. Pub. 
Library. 



to hear one clown rail cleverly at another? But to 
see the bishops collectively and the primate and 
others severally put into a pillory and pelted in this 
daring fashion by a man who knew that his life 
would pay the forfeit for his libel if he could by 
any means be discovered, was livelier sport than 
bull-baiting. 

Dr. Cooper, Bishop of Winchester, replied to 
the first pamphlet somewhat ponderously, as be- 
came a bishop who feels that the proprieties for- 
bid his being too interesting. Marprelate wanted 
nothing better than a bishop for an antagonist ; 
and while the whole constabulary force of the 
kingdom was hunting him for his life, the nimble 
Martin was chuckling over the excitement made 
by a new tract of his, headed with the well-known 
street cry of a tub-mender, which played derisively 
on Bishop Cooper's name, " Hay any worke for 
Cooper ? " This tract professed to be " printed 
in Europe not farre from some of the Bounsing 
priestes." In this paper Martin shows to what 
depth a religious debate in Elizabeth's time could 
descend ; he stoops to make the bishop ridiculous 
by twitting him with the infidelity of his wife, a 
scandal which the unfortunate prelate had treated 
with " Socratical and philosophical patience." 

There were not v/anting many imitators of Mar- 
tin's grossness on the other side of the controversy, 
who were just as libelous but for the most part less 
clever. One of the tracts in reply was called An 
Almond for a Parrat. The author says he had 



Rise and Dcvelopjiient of Puritanism. 



117 



heard that Martin was dead, or, as he expressed 
it, " that your grout-headed holinesse had turned 
uppe your heeles like a tired jade in a medow and 
snorted out your sorrowefuU soule, like a mesled 
hogge on a mucke-hille." This is beastly without 
being vivacious. While the press and the stage 
were occupied with coarse retorts on Martinism, 
there appeared tracts in favor of peace. There are 
other evidences of the existence of a moderate 
party that lamented the excesses of both sides in 
this debate. 

IX. 

Puritanism was evolutionary from the begin- 
ning. Its earlier disputes about vestments and 
litanies grew by degrees to a rejection of all litur- 
gies as idolatrous. Even the reading of the Bible 
as a part of the service came at last to be repre- 
hended by extremists, and the repetition of the 
Lord's Prayer was thought dangerously liturgical. 
The advanced Puritans sought to exclude from 
Christian worship everything pleasing to the aes- 
thetic sense, confounding bareness with simplicity. 
Compromises continued to be made inside the 
church, but in the ultimate ideal of Puritan wor- 
ship there remained, besides the sermon, nothing 
but long extemporary prayers and the singing by 
the untrained voices of the congregation of literal 
versions of the Hebrew Psalms — doggerel verse in 
cobblestone meters. 



Chap, I. 



Comp. 
Bacon's 
An Adver- 
tisement 
touching 
Controver- 
sies, etc. 



Advance 
of Puritan 
opinions. 



ii8 



The Puritan Migration. 



X. 

In its early stages Puritanism was a crusade 
against idolatry, and drew its inspiration in this, as 
in nearly everything else, from the Old Testament. 
To the word " idolatry " it gave an inclusiveness 
not found in the Jewish Scriptures, and puzzling to 
a mind accustomed to modern ways of thinking. 
There was hardly any set observance of the church 
in which constructive idolatry did not lie concealed. 
All holy days except Sunday were abhorred as 
things that bore the mark of the Beast. Even in 
the reign of Edward VI, long before the name 
of Puritanism was known, the May-poles round 
which English people made merry once a year 
were denounced as idols in a sermon preached at 
Paul's Cross by Sir Stephen — the " Sir " being a 
polite prefix to a clergyman's name. This Stephen, 
curate of St. Catherine Cree, was a forerunner of 
Puritanism, who sometimes defiantly preached from 
an elm tree in the chuchyard and read the serv- 
ice standing on a tomb on the north side of the 
church. He wanted the saintly names of churches 
and the heathen names of daj^s of the week 
changed, so keen was his scent for idolatry. The 
parish of St. Andrew Undershaft had received its 
distinctive name from a very tall May-pole that 
overtopped the church steeple. This pole was 
erected annually, and it rested from one May to 
another on hooks under the eaves of a row of 
houses and stalls. In the newborn Protestant zeal 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



119 



against idols Sir Stephen denounced especially the 
lofty shaft of St. Andrew. The people in their 
rage took it from the hooks and sawed it in pieces, 
and its sections were appropriated by the several 
householders who had given it shelter and who 
presently heaped its parts upon one great bonfire. 
Puritanism kept up its Don Quixote battle against 
May-poles until there was hardly one standing to 
seduce the people to idolatry. When the Puritan 
party came into power, nearly a hundred years 
after the days of Sir Stephen of St. Catherine Cree, 
one of its earliest laws ordered that all May-poles 
— " an heathenish vanity generally abused to super- 
stition and wickedness " — be taken down. 

XI. 

From denouncing constructive idolatry in or- 
gan music, litanies, and May-poles, the transition 
to attack on the more real and substantial evils in 
ordinary conduct was inevitable. History has 
many examples of this pervasiveness of scrupulos- 
ity. The Puritan conscience had been let loose 
to tear in pieces the remnants of old superstitions. 
It was certain to break over into the field of con- 
duct. Having set out to reform the church, it took 
the world by the way. 

As early as 1583 Philip Stubbes, a Puritan 
lawyer, issued his hot little book. The Anatomic of 
Abuses. It deals with the immoralities and ex- 
travagances of the time. Stubbes repeats the early 
Puritan objection to the May-pole : it is a " stinck- 



Chap. I. 

1549- 



Rush- 
worth, Pt. 
Ill, vol. ii, 
749. A. D. 
1644. 



Austerity 
in morals. 



120 



The Puritan Mifj-ration. 



Book II. 



Pickering's 
ed., p. 172. 



yng idol," he declares, which the people bring from 
the woods, " followyng it with greate devotion." 
And when they have set it up they " leape and 
daunce aboute it, as the heathen people did at the 
dedication of their idolles." But Stubbes takes a 
step forward and objects to the all-night Ma)'- frol- 
ics on account of their immorality. He says, " I 
have heard it credibly reported by nien of great 
gravitie, credite and reputation, that of fourtie, three 
score, or a hundred maides goyng to the woods 
over night, there have scarcely the third parte of 
them returned home againe undefiled." As men 
of " great gravitie, credite and reputation " were not 
likely to know the facts in this case, some of the 
immorality with which Stubbes charges the young 
people may have been as fanciful as the heathenism 
attributed to them. Imputed unrighteousness was 
a part of the Puritan system. He denounces the 
wild excesses in dress and the other follies of the 
time with a lack of a sense of proportion which al- 
ready foreshadows later Puritanism. 

This secondary development of Puritanism by 
which its energies were turned toward the regula- 
tion of conduct, as the disputes of the Reformation 
period lost their violence, gave to the name Puritan 
a new and higher sense. It is a phase of its history 
more important than all its primary contentions 
over gowns and liturgies and hierarchies, or its 
later debates about the five points of Calvinism and 
a sabbatical Sunday. One may easily forget its 
austerity and extravagance, for by the reform of 



Rise and Developjrient of Puritanism. 



121 



manners this movement made the English race its 
debtor. In no succeeding reaction have English 
morals reverted to the ante-Puritan level. It is 
only by the religious ferments infused successively 
by new sects and movements, of preaching friars, 
Lollards, Puritans, Quakers, Methodists, Salvation- 
ists, that the great unleavened mass of men is ren- 
dered gradually less sodden. 

XII. 

The last years of Elizabeth's long reign were 
years of apparent Puritan decline. The old bug- 
bear of popery was receding into the past, and a 
new generation had come on the stage that had 
no memory of the struggles of the reigns of 
Henry and Edward and Mary. The danger from 
the Armada had brought English patriotism to 
the point of fusion. Even the persecuted Catho- 
lics rallied to the support of the queen against 
Philip. The government of Elizabeth rose to the 
zenith of its popularity on the overthrow of the 
Armada. It was just at this inopportune moment, 
when the nation had come to feel that the Eng- 
land of Elizabeth was the greatest England the 
ages had known, that there came forth from a small 
coterie of the oppressed ultra-Puritans the Martin 
Marprelate tracts. However effective these may 
have been at first in making the bishops ridicu- 
lous, there followed a swift reaction. The Puri- 
tans were dubbed Martinists, and henceforth had 
to bear the odium of the boisterous vulgarity and 



Chap. 1. 



Puritan 
decline. 



Supra, 
page 115. 



122 



The PtiritaJi Migration. 



Book II. 



Rogers's 
Pref. to the 
39 Articles. 



libelous exaggeration of the Marprelate lampoons. 
The queen's government, stronger now than ever 
in the affection of the people, put in force severe 
ecclesiastical measures against nonconformists in 
the church, and sent Brownists, or Separatists, 
to die b}^ the score in loathsome prisons. Half 
a dozen of their leaders were dispatched by the 
shorter road of the gallows. The long reign of 
the queen had by this time discouraged those who 
hoped for a change of policy at her death. Hook- 
er's masterful and delightful prose, informed by 
a spirit of winning moderation, was arrayed on the 
side of the Anglicans by the publication of parts 
of his Ecclesiastical Polity in 1594 and 1597. But 
Puritanism suffered most from the persistence of 
Archbishop Whitgift and others in efforts to sup- 
press all nonconformity in the church. These 
champions of Anglicanism, in the swaggering 
words of one of them, " defended the prelacy, 
stood for the power of the state, put the new doc- 
tors to the foil, profiigated the elders, set upon the 
presbytery, and so battered the new discipline as 
hitherto they could never nor hereafter shall ever 
fortify and repair the decay thereof." The pres- 
byteries which Cartwright and his friends had 
formed within the Church of England were swept 
out utterly by the archbishop's broom. The Puri- 
tan movement which had begun almost simultane- 
ously with Elizabeth's reign seemed to be doomed 
to languish and die with the old queen who had 
been its resolute and lifelong antagonist. 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



123 



XIII. 

For the first thirty years or more of its exist- 
ence Puritanism was mainly a bundle of negations, 
and no bundle of mere negations is a sufficient rea- 
son for maintaining a party. No vestments, no 
ceremonies, no bishops, were effective cries in the 
hot Reformation period. But the new generation 
had ceased to abhor these left-overs of Romanism. 
Bishops, gowns, prayer books, had become Protes- 
tant to most of the people by association. To find 
additional reasons for differing from Anglican op- 
ponents was a party necessity. The new debates 
which sprang up in the last years of the sixteenth 
century were not deliberately planned by the Puri- 
tans, as some of their opponents asserted. They 
came by a process of evolution. But a period of 
temporary decline in a movement of this sort 
hastens its natural unfolding. The leaders are 
forced to seek the advantage of such new issues as 
offer when the old ones fail. In the last years of 
Elizabeth, Puritanism was molting, not dying. 

XIV. 

The great reformers of the sixteenth century 
had sought to strip from the Christianity of their 
time what they deemed the second-hand garments 
of Judaism. Along with the theory of a priest- 
hood they declared also against a doctrine known 
in the church at least from the fifth century, that 
the fourth commandment enforced on Christians 



Chap. I. 



Seeking a 

positive 

ground. 

Note 7. 



The Puri- 
tan Sab- 
bath. 



124 



The Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Rise of the 
strict Sab- 
bath. 



the keeping sacred in some sense of Sundays and 
other church holy days. Luther maintained that 
a commandment to keep the Sabbath " literally 
understood does not apply to Christians, for it is 
entirely outward, like other ordinances of the Old 
Testament." He thought a festival day important 
for rest and for attending religious worship ; but 
with characteristic oppugnancy he says : " If any- 
where the day is made holy for the mere day's 
sake, . . . then I order you to dance on it, and 
feast on it, to do anything that shall remove this 
encroachment on Christian liberty." The Augs- 
burg Confession makes a similar statement of the 
Protestant position. Calvin considered the fourth 
commandment binding on Christians only in a 
sense mystical and highly Calvinistic. It signified 
that " we should rest from our own works " under 
the Christian dispensation. He even suggested 
that some other day of the week might be chosen 
as a day of rest and worship at Geneva for an ex- 
hibition of Christian liberty in this regard. His 
practice was conformed to his theory. It is inci- 
dentally related that when John Knox once visited 
the Genevan reformer on Sunday, he found him 
playing at bowls. Knox was not more a Sabba- 
tarian than Calvin. 

XV. 

Writers on this subject have generally agreed 
in datinof the rise of the Puritan Sabbath from the 
appearance, in 1595, of Dr. Bownd's book on The 



Rise and Development of Pw'itanisvi. 



125 



Sabbath of the Old and of the New Testament. 
But the doctrine of the strict keeping of Sunday 
may be traced farther back. In truth, the differ- 
ence between the English and the Continental Sun- 
day dates from the Reformation. The protests of 
Luther and Calvin go to show that Sunday had in 
the church before the Reformation, theoretically 
if not in practice, the sanctity of a church feast. 
The English Reformation was conservative, like all 
other English revolutions. English reformers re- 
tained the Catholic Sunday, as they did the vest- 
ments and national hierarchy of the old church. 
Thomas Hancock has been styled " the Luther of 
the southwest of England." He was the great 
preacher of Poole in the days of Edward VI. 
That he, like other English reformers, did not 
agree with Luther in rejecting the obligation to 
rest on Sunday is shown by the record, for the 
voice of Poole was the voice of Hancock. About 
1550 the juries in the Admiralty Court of Poole 
were charged to inquire into Sunday fishing ; and 
so advanced was the premature Puritanism of Ed- 
ward's time that even the leaving of nets in the sea 
over Sunday was to be investigated. Here was a 
strictness unknown in Catholic times. 

XVI. 

The word Sabbath does not occur in these 
early entries. But in the troubles among the 
Marian exiles at Frankfort, where so many other 
traits of Puritanism first came above the horizon, it 



Chap. I. 



Note 8. 



Compare 
Marsden's 
Early Puri- 
tans (1850) 
page 242, 
where Be- 
con's Cate- 
chism and 
Coverdale 
are quoted. 



Robert's 
Social 
Hist, of the 
Southern 
Counties, 
p. 239- 



Note 9. 



126 



TJie Puritan AUs'ratiofi. 



Book II. 



Supra, 
page 1 6. 



Early Eng- 
lish Text 
Society Re- 
print, io6, 
107, loS. 



is significant that one finds Sunday called the Sab- 
bath. Sabbath as applied to Sunday occurs first 
in literature, perhaps, in 1573, and then it is con- 
sidered necessary to explain it. Bullein's Dialogue 
against the Fever Pestilence, a work of consider- 
able popularity, first appeared as early as 1564. In 
the edition of 1573 there was inserted a new pas- 
sage not found in the earlier issue. Mendax is re- 
lating incredible tales of travel in lands unknown, 
after the manner of David Ingram and other re- 
turned adventurers. Up to this point all is pure 
lying merely for the fun of the thing, or perhaps to 
ridicule the exaggerations of travelers. But the 
interpolated passage is not of a piece with the old 
garment into which it is patched. It is less gro- 
tesque and humorous, and it smacks of incipient 
Puritanism in several flavors. It treats first of all 
of the " Kepyng of the Saboth Daie," " whiche is 
the seventh daie, that is sondaie," in the imaginary 
city of " Nodnol," an anagram of London. The 
gates are shut, and nobody is allowed to "goe, 
neither ride forth of the Citie duryng that daie, 
except it be after the euenyng praier ; then to 
walke honestlie into the sweete fieldes, and at 
every gate in the time of service there are ward- 
ers." " What so ever hee be he muste kepe hollie 
the Sabboth daie, and come to the churche both 
man, woman, young and olde." " There were no 
people walking abroad in the service tyme ; no, 
not a Dogge or catte in the streate, neither any 
Taverne doore open that daie, nor wine bibbyng 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



127 



in them, but onely almose, fasting and praier." 
This is perhaps the oldest extant statement of an 
early Puritan ideal of Sabbath-keeping. 

XVII. 

Scruples regarding recreations on Sunday 
come distinctly into view in the title of a sermon 
preached at Paul's Cross in 1576. In 1580 the 
magistrates of London secured from the queen a 
prohibition of the performance of plays within the 
limits of the city on Sundays. In other municipali- 
ties — Brighton, Yarmouth, and Lj-me — ordinances 
were made about this time against such offenses as 
the prosecution on Sunday of the herring fisheries, 
cloth working, and other labors, and even against 
the Sunday practice of archery, formerly thought 
a patriotic exercise. There are other evidences of 
a movement, especially in the south of England, in 
favor of a stricter Sabbath in these and the fol- 
lowing years. Stubbes does not fail to denounce 
"heathnicall exercises upon the Sabbaoth day, 
which the Lorde would have consecrated to holy 
uses." The Puritan mode of Sabbath-keeping al- 
ready existed among the chosen few. " The Sab- 
both daie of some is well observed," says Stubbes, 
" namely, in hearing the blessed worde of God 
read, preached, and interpreted ; in private and 
publique praiers ; in reading of godly psalmes ; in 
celebrating the sacraments ; and in collecting for 
the poore and indigent, which are the true uses 
and endes whereto the Sabbaoth was ordained." 



Chap. I. 



Cox's Lit- 
erature of 
the Sab- 
bath Ques- 
tion, sub 
attno. 



Robert's 
Southern 
Counties, 
pp. 238, 
239- 



1583. 



128 



TJie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



I5S8. 



Bownd on 
the Sab- 
bath. 

1595- 



1592. 



He records the opposite belief of his opponents 
that Sunday was ordained " onely to use what 
kinde of exercises they thinke good themselves." 
In practice this was the rule of the English peo- 
ple at large. These opposite opinions come into 
view when Martin Marprelate a few years later 
berates the Bishop of London for playing at bowls 
on Sunday. 

XVIII. 

Dr. Bownd's book on The Sabbath of the Old 
and the New Testament, which, if we may be- 
lieve its opponents, was nearly ten years " in 
the hammering," was the outcome of a senti- 
ment already rising among the Puritans, and 
not wholly confined to that part3^ It was pre- 
ceded by a little work of Richard Greenham 
which seems to have been circulated for some 
years in manuscript after a fashion of that time, 
and to have had at first more influence on prac- 
tice than Bownd's formal treatise. Greenham was 
Bownd's stepfather, and his work was the parent 
of Bownd's, which is distinctly more extreme. But 
Dr. Bownd's book is none the less memorable as a 
point of departure, because in it the opinions on 
this subject which have since prevailed so gener- 
ally in all English-speaking lands " were for the 
first time broadly and prominently asserted in 
Christendom " ; at least, they were here first sys- 
tematically propounded and defended. Bownd 
held that the fourth commandment is partly moral, 



Rise and Development of Puritajiisnt. 



129 



in the phrase of the casuists. He shifted the obli- 
gation to the first day of the week by arguments 
now familiar, and he laid down rules for the ob- 
servance of the day. Honest recreations and law- 
ful delights he flatly forbids on Sundays, but he 
rather obsequiously makes some allowance for the 
" feasts of noblemen and great personages on this 
day." People of rank do not wholly escape him, 
however, for he points a moral with the story of a 
nobleman whose child was born with a face like 
that of a dog, because the father had hunted on 
the Lord's Day. He allows the ringing of only 
one bell to call the people to church on Sunday. 
Chimes were quite too pleasing to accord with a 
severe Sabbath. 

XIX. 

Such rigor fell in with the passion of that 
age for formal observance and with the exi- 
gent temper of the Puritans by whom Bownd's 
views were rapidly and universally accepted. 
The stricter divines might well be glad of a 
new lever for reforming the old English Sun- 
day, which was devoted, out of service time, to 
outdoor games, to the brutally cruel sports of 
bull and bear baiting, to merry morris-dances, 
in which the performers were gayly decked and 
hung with jingling bells in different keys, as 
well as to coarse farces called interludes, which 
were played on stages under booths and some- 
times in the churches. As an austere reaction 



Chap. I. 



Note 10. 



Spread of 
Bownd's 
opinions. 



Cart- 
wright's 
Admoni- 
tion to Par- 
liament, 

1572- 
Robert's 
Southern 
Counties, 
PP- 37, 38. 



i^.o 



The Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Preva- 
lence of 
the strict 
Sabbath. 



against frivolity, Puritanism pushed Sabbath-keep- 
ing to its extreme, reprobating even the most 
innocent and domestic recreations, and changing 
a day of rest and refreshment into one of alter- 
nate periods of application to religious devotion 
and of scrupulous vacuity. Bownd's rather ultra 
propositions were carried yet further when re- 
produced by high-strung preachers. It is said 
that some of these declared that the ringing of 
more than one bell to call people to church on 
the Sabbath was as great a sin as murder, adul- 
tery, or parricide. The lack of a sense of pro- 
portion is the specific distinction of the zealot and 
the polemic. This lack was not peculiar to the 
Puritans, however. Joseph Hall, afterward a well- 
known bishop, could address men so worthy as 
John Robinson and his colleague in such words 
as these : " Your souls shall find too late . . . 
that even whoredoms and murders shall abide an 
easier answer than separation." Perhaps one may 
rather say that a lack of the sense of proportion 
in morals was a trait of that age, an age of zealots 
and polemics. 

XX. 

In such a time Dr. Bownd's book easily cap- 
tivated the religious public, and there arose a 
passion for a stricter Sabbath. According to 
Fuller, the Lord's Day, especially in towns, " be- 
gan to be precisely kept, people becoming a 
law to themselves, forbearing such sports as yet 



Rise and Development of Puritanisnt. 

by statute permitted ; yea, many rejoicing at 
their own restraint herein. On this day the 
stoutest fencer laid down the buckler; the most 
skillful archer unbent the bow, countinsr all 
shooting beside the mark ; May-games and mor- 
ris-dancers grew out of request ; and good reason 
that bells should be silenced from jingling about 
men's legs, if their very ringing in steeples were 
adjudged unlawful." Some learned scholars were 
impressed by Bownd's argument, and others who 
did not agree with his conclusions thought it best 
not to gainsay them, "because they tended to the 
manifest advance of religion." And indeed the 
new zeal for Sabbath-keeping must have inciden- 
tally promoted morals and good order in so licen- 
tious an age. 

But a violent opposition quickly arose. Some 
opposed the book as " galling men's necks with 
a Jewish yoke against the liberty of Christians," 
and many of the clergy of the new high-church 
type resented the doctrine of a Christian Sab- 
bath, asserting that it put " an unequal lustre 
on the Sunday on set purpose to eclipse all 
other holy days to the derogation of the author- 
ity of the church." There were those who as- 
serted that the " brethren," as they styled them, 
had brought forth Bownd's book, intending by 
this " attack from an odd corner " to retrieve 
lost ground. The manifest advantage to Puritan- 
ism from the shifting of the ground of debate, 
aroused Archbishop Whitgift. In 1599 he made 



131 



Chap. I. 



Fuller's 
Ch. Hist, 
of Britain, 
book ix, 
sect, viii, 
20, 21. 



Opposi- 
tion to 
Bownd. 



Fuller's 
Church 
History, 
book ix, 
sect, viii, 
21. 



Note II. 



132 



TJie Puritan Mio^ration. 



Book II. 



Note 12. 



1611. 



Note 13. 



Effect on 
Puritan- 
ism. 



the tactical mistake of ordering the book called 
in, and in 1600 Chief-Justice Pophara forbade 
the reprinting of it. The price of the work 
was doubled at once, and it was everywhere 
sought for, books being " more called on when 
called in," as Fuller says. When it could not 
be had in print, it was transcribed by enthusi- 
astic admirers and circulated " from friend to 
friend " in manuscript. As soon as Whitgift's 
" head was laid," a new and enlarged edition 
was published. 

The theory of a Sunday-Sabbath, which from 
the first was not confined to the Puritans, per- 
meated English and x\merican thought and life. 
But from that time forward the Puritans made 
rigid Sabbath-keeping the very mark and pass- 
word of the faithful. From England the theory 
spread northward to Scotland, where it found a 
congenial soil. The strict observance of Sunday 
was embodied in those Laws, Divine, Moral, and 
Martial, under which Sir Thomas Dale oppressed 
Virginia, years before the earliest Puritan migra- 
tion carried it to the coast of New England. 
On that coast Bownd's Sabbath took on its 
deepest hue, becoming at last as grievous an 
evil, perhaps, as the frivolity it had supplanted. 

XXI. 

The Puritans protesting against Hebraism in 
vestments, in priesthood, in liturgy, and in festivals, 
fell headlong- into the Pharisaism of the risfid Sab- 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



133 



bath. History records many similar phenomena. 
To escape from the spirit of one's age is difficult 
for an individual, impossible perhaps for a sect 
or party. Nevertheless, the Sabbath agitation 
had given a new impulse to the Puritan move- 
ment — had, indeed, given it a positive party cry, 
and had furnished it with a visible badge of 
superior sanctity. 

The Calvinistic controversy which broke out 
almost simultaneously with that about the Sab- 
bath and prevailed throughout the reign of 
James I, added yet one more issue, by making 
Puritanism the party of a stern and conserva- 
tive orthodoxy, as opposed to the newer Armin- 
ianism which spread so quickly among the High- 
Church clergy. From all these fresh developments 
Puritanism gained in power and compactness, if 
it lost something of simplicity and spirituality. 
Standing for ultra-Protestantism, for good morals, 
for an ascetic Sabbath, for a high dogmatic ortho- 
doxy, Puritanism could not but win the allegiance 
of the mass of the English people, and especially 
of the middle class. It was this new, compact, 
austere, dogmatic, self-confident Puritanism, when 
it had become a political as well as a rehgious 
movement, that obliterated Laud and Charles and 
set up the Commonwealth. And in studying the 
evolution of this later Puritanism we have been 
present at the shaping of New England in Old 
England. 



Chap. I. 



The new 
Puritan- 
ism. 



134 



TJie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Note I, 
page 99. 



Note 2, V 
page 100. 



Elucidations. 

Evelyn's Diary, pp. 4, 5; date, 1634: "My father was ap- 
pointed Sheriff for Surrey and Sussex before they were disjoyned. 
He had 116 servants in liverys, everyone livery'd in greene sattin 
doublets. Divers gentlemen and persons of quality waited on 
him in the same garbe and habit, which at that time (when 30 or 
40 was the usual retinue of a High Sheriff) was esteem'd a great 
matter. . . . He could not refuse the civility of his friends and 
relations who voluntarily came themselves, or sent in their serv- 
ants." Compare Chamberlain's remarks about Sir George Yeard- 
ley, whom he styles "a mean fellow," and says that the king 
had knighted him when he was appointed Governor of Virginia, 
" which hath set him up so high that he flaunts it up and down 
the streets in extraordinary bravery with fourteen or fifteen fair 
liveries after him." Domestic Correspondence, James I, No. no. 
Calendar, p. 598. The propriety of keeping so many idle serving 
men is sharply called in question in a tract entitled Cyuile and 
Vncyuile Life, 1 579, and an effort is made to prove the dignity of 
a serving man's position, while its decline is confessed in A 
Health to the Gentlemanly Profession of Servingmen, 1598. Both 
of these tracts are reprinted in Inedited Tracts, etc., Roxburghe 
Library, 1868. The serving man was not a menial. He ren- 
dered personal services to his master or to guests, he could 
carve on occasion, and as a successor to the military retainers 
of an earlier time he was ready to fight in any of his master's 
quarrels ; but his principal use was to lend dignity to the man- 
sion and to amuse the master or his guests with conversation 
during lonely hours in the country house. Among the first 
Jamestown emigrants were some of these retainers, as we have 
seen. 

The Anatomic of Abuses, by Philip Stubbes, 1 583, Pickering's 
reprint, pages 16, 17 : "It is lawfull for the nobilitie, the gentrie 
and magisterie to weare riche attire, euery one in their call- 
yng. The nobility and gentrie to innoble, garnish, and set forth 
birthes, dignities, and estates. The magisterie to dignifie their 
callynges. . . . But now there is suche a confuse mingle mangle 
of apparell, and suche preposterous excesse thereof, as euery one 
is permitted to flaunt it out in what apparell he lusteth himself, 
or can get by any kinde of meanes. So that it is very hard to 



Rise and Dcvelopme7it of Puritanism. 



135 



know who is noble, who is worshipfull, who is a gentleman, who 
is not ; for you shal haue those which are neither of the nobilitie, 
gentilitie nor yeomanrie ... go daielyin silkes, veluettes, satens, 
damaskes, tafifaties and suche hke ; notwithstanding that they be 
bothe base by birthe, meane by estate, and seruile by callyng. 
And this I coinpte a greate confusion, and a generall disorder in 
a Christian common wealth." 

A Brieff Discourse of the Troubles begun at Frankfort, 1 564, 
is the primary authority. It is almost beyond doubt that Whit- 
tingham. Dean of Durham, a participant in the troubles, wrote 
the book. The Frankfort struggles have been discussed recently 
in Mr. Hinds's The Making of the England of Elizabeth, but, like 
all writers on the subject. Hinds is obliged to depend almost 
solely on Whittingham's account. The several volumes of letters 
from the archives of Zurich, published by the Parker Society, 
give a good insight into the forces at work in the English Refor- 
mation. See, for example, in the volume entitled Original Letters, 
1 537-1 558, that of Thomas Sampson to Calvin, dated Strasburgh, 
February 23, 1555, which shows the Puritan movement half 
fledged at this early date when Calvin's authoritative advice is in- 
voked. " The flame is lighted up with increased vehemence 
amongst us English. For a strong controversy has arisen, while 
some desire the book of reformation of the Church of England to 
be set aside altogether, others only deem some things in it ob- 
jectionable, such as kneeling at the Lord's Supper, the linen sur- 
plice, and other matters of this kind ; but the rest of it, namely, 
the prayers, scripture lessons and the form of the administration 
of baptism and the Lord's Supper they wish to be retained." 

There are many and conflicting accounts of the origin of the 
name. In the Narragansett Club Publications, ii, 197-199, there 
is an interesting statement of some of these by the editor of Cot- 
ton's Answer to Roger Williams, in a note. 

That the Puritans early made common cause with the suffering 
tenantry is not a matter of conjecture. Philip Stubbes, in 1583, 
in the Anatomic of Abuses, pp. 126, 127, writes : " They take in 
and inclose commons, moores, heathes, and other common pas- 
tures, where out the poore commonaltie were wont to haue all 
their forrage and feedyng for their cattell, and (whiche is more) 
corne for themselves to liue vpon ; all which are now in most 
places taken from them, by these greedie puttockes to the great 



Chap. I. 



Note 3, 
page 106, 



Note 4, 
page 106. 



Note 5, 
page III. 



< 



136 



TJie Puritan Jlli^ration. 



Book II. 



Note 6, 
page 112. 



impouerishyng and vtter beggerj'ng of many whole townes and 
parishes. . . . For these inclosures bee the causes why riche men 
eate vpp poore men, as beastes dooe eate grasse." One might 
cite recent economic writers on the effect of inclosures, but the 
conservative laments of the antiquar}^ Aubrey, in his Introduction 
to the Survey of Wiltshire, written about 1663, give us a nearer 
and more picturesque, if less philosophical, view. He says : 
" Destroying of Manours began Temp. Hen. VHI., but now com- 
mon ; whereby the mean People live lawless, no body to govern 
them, they care for no body, having no Dependance on any Body. 
By this Method, and by the Selling of the Church-Lands, is the 
Ballance of the Government quite alter'd and put into the Hands 
of the common People." Writing from what he had heard from 
his grandfather, he says : " Anciently the Leghs i. e. Pastures 
were noble large Grounds. ... So likewise in his Remembrance 
was all between Kington St. Michael and Dracot-Ferne common 
Fields. Then were a world of labouring People maintained by 
the Plough. . . , There were no Rates for the Poor in my Grand- 
father's Days . . . the Church-ale at Whitsuntide did the Busi- 
ness. . . . Since the Reformation and Inclosures aforesaid these 
Parts have swarm'd with poor People. The Parish of Cain pays 
to the Poor 500/ per anman. . . . Inclosures are for the private, 
not for the publick Good. For a Shepherd and his Dog, or a 
Milk-Maid, can manage Meadow-Land, that upon arable, em- 
ploy'd the Hands of several Scores of Labourers." Miscellanies 
on Several Curious Subjects, now first published, etc., 1723, pp. 
30-33. It will fall within the province of another volume of this 
series to treat of the systems of landholding brought from Eng- 
land, and I shall not go further into the subject of inclosures here. 
A portion of the agricultural population seemed superfluous in 
consequence of inclosures, and colonization was promoted as a 
means of ridding the country of the excess of its population. 

In the matter of Church government Puritanism passed through 
three different periods. In the reign of Elizabeth the Church- 
Puritan was mainly Presbyterian under Cartwright's lead. 
But there was even then a current that set toward Independency. 
Separatism was the outward manifestation of this tendency, and 
according to Ralegh's estimate, cited in the text, there were about 
twenty thousand declared Separatists in England in 1593. After 
the suppression of the presbyteries within the Church in the last 
years of Elizabeth, and the crushing out of the Separatists by rig- 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



137 



orous persecutions, questions of the particular form of Church 
government fell into abeyance among the Puritans for about forty 
years. " Indiscriminate anti-prelacy was the prevailing mood of 
the English people," says Masson, " and the distinction between 
Presbyterianism and Independency was yet caviare to the gen- 
eral." Life of Milton, ii, 590. Richard Baxter, the Puritan divine 
(as quoted by Masson), confesses in 1641 that until that year he 
had never thought what Presbytery or Independency was, or ever 
spoke with a man who seemed to know it. See also Hanbury's 
Memorials, ii, 69. Writers on this period do not seem to recog- 
nize the fact that the two views Vv'ere in some rivalry among the 
early Puritans, and that the theory of the independence of the local 
church seems to have been at least foreshadowed in the opinions 
at Frankfort. But there was a long generation in which these 
differences among the Puritans were forgotten in their life-and- 
death conflict with the Episcopal party. Then, as Puritanism 
came into power, the example of other Protestant European coun- 
tries drew England toward Presbyterianism, while the voice of New 
England came from over the sea pleading for Congregationalism. 

A letter of Sandys, afterward Archbishop of York, to Bullinger, 
quoted by Marsden, Early Puritans, 57, shows that though Puri- 
tanism by 1573 had become something other than it was at 
Frankfort, it was still mainly negative. Sandys writes : " New ora- 
tors are rising up from among us ; foolish young men who despise 
authority and admit of no superior. They are seeking the com- 
plete overthrow and uprooting of the whole of our ecclesiastical 
polity ; and striving to shape out for us I know not what new 
platform of a church." He gives a summary under nine heads. 
The assertion that each parish should have its own " presby- 
tery " and choose its own minister, and that the judicial laws of 
Moses were binding, are the only positive ones. No authority 
of the magistrate in ecclesiastical matters, no government of the 
Church except by ministers, elders, and deacons, the taking away 
of all titles, dignities, lands, and revenues of bishops, etc., from 
the Church, the allowing of no ministers but actual pastors, the 
refusal of baptism to the children of papists, fill the rest of this 
summary. One misses from this skeleton the insistence on Sab- 
bath-keeping, church-going, " ordinances," and ascetic austerity 
in morals that afterward became distinctive traits of the party. 

Augustine and other early doctors of the Church held to a 
Sunday-Sabbath in the fifth century, basing it largely on grounds 



Chap. I. 



Note 7, 
page 123. 



►> 



Note 8, 
page 125. 



I -.8 



The Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Note 9, 
page 125, 



, y 

that now seem mystical. Compare Cox^ on Sabbath Laws and - V 

Sabbath Duties, 284, note, and Cook's Historical and General ^ 
View of Christianity, ii, 301, cited by Coxg. The question was ^ 
variously treated during the middle ages, St. Thomas Aquinas 
and other schoolmen taking the prevalent modern view that the 
fourth commandment was partly moral and partly ceremonial. 
There is a curious story, for which I do not know the original au- 
thority, of Eustachius, Abbot of Hay, in the thirteenth century, 
who on his return from the Holy Land preached from city to 
city against buying and selling on Sundays and saints' days. He 
had with him a copy of a document dropped from heaven and 
found on the altar of St. Simon, on Mount Golgotha. This 
paper threatened that if the command were disobeyed it should 
rain stones and wood and hot water in the night, and, as if 
such showers were not enough, wild beasts were to devour the 
Sabbath-breakers. That there was a difference of opinion in that 
age is shown by the fact that Roger Bacon, later in the thirteenth 
century, thought it worth while to assert that Christians should 
work and hold fairs on Sunday, while Saturday was the proper 
day for rest. He showed no document from heaven, but, like a 
true philosopher of that time, the learned friar appealed to argu- 
ments drawn from astrology. Hearne's Remains, ii, 177, cites 
Mirandula. Legislation by Parliament regarding Sunday ob- 
servance was rare before the Reformation. A statute of 28 Ed- 
ward ni incidentally excepts Sunday from the days on which 
wool may be shorn, and one of 27 Henry VI forbids the keeping 
of fairs and markets on Sundays, Good Fridays, and principal fes- 
tivals except four Sundays in harvest. In 4 Edward IV a statute 
was passed forbidding the sale of shoes on Sundays and certain 
festivals. 

In the " Injunctions by King Edward VI," 1547, Bishop 
Sparrow's Collection, edition of 167 1, p. 8, there is a remarkable 
statement of what may be called the Edwardean view of Sunday 
as distinguished from the opinions and practice that had come 
down from times preceding the Reformation : " God is more of- 
fended than pleased, more dishonoured than honoured upon the 
holy-day because of idleness, pride, drunkenness," etc. The re- 
ligious and moral duties to which the " holy-day," as it is called, 
should be strictly devoted are there specified. But, true to the 
position of compromise, halfwayness, and one might add para- 
dox, which the English Reformation took from the beginning, 



Rise and Development of Puritanism. 



139 



there is added in the same paragraph the following: "Yet not- 
withstanding all Parsons, Vicars, and Curates, shall teach and 
declare unto their Parishioners, that they may with a safe and 
quiet conscience, in the time of Harvest, labour upon the holy 
and festival days and save that thing which God hath sent. And 
if for any scrupulosity, or grudge of conscience, men should su- 
perstitiously abstain from working upon those days, that then they 
should grievously offend and displease God." See also " Thacte 
made for thabrogacion of certayne holy-dayes," in the reign of 
Henry VHI, 1536, in the same black-letter collection, p. 167. In 
this act " Sabboth-day " occurs, but apparently with reference to 
the Jewish Sabbath only. " Sonday " is used for Sunday. 

Dr. Bownd's Sabathum Veteris et Novi Testamenti is ex- 
ceedingly rare. There is a copy in the Prince Collection of the 
Boston Public Library. It is the only one in this countr)% so far 
as I can learn. I am under obligations in several matters to Cox's 
Literature of the Sabbath Question, to the same author's Sabbath 
Laws and Sabbath Duties, and to Hessey's Bampton Lectures 
for i860. 

It is Thomas Rogers, the earliest opponent of the doctrine of 
Greenham and Bownd, who sees a deep-laid plot in the publica- 
tion of their books. " What the brethren wanted in strength 
they had in wiliness," he says. " For while these worthies of 
our church were employing their engines and forces partly in de- 
fending the present government ecclesiastical, partly in assaulting 
the presbytery and new discipline, even at that very instant the 
brethren . . . abandoned quite the bulwarks which they had 
raised and gave out were impregnable : suffering us to beat them 
down, without any or very small resistance, and yet not careless 
of affairs, left not the wars for all that, but from an odd corner, 
and after a new fashion which we little thought of (such was 
their cunning), set upon us afresh again by dispersing in printed 
books (which for ten years' space before they had been in ham- 
mering among themselves to make them complete) their Sabbath 
speculations and presbyterian (that is more than kingly or 
popely) directions for the observance of the Lord's Day." Pref- 
ace to Thirty-nine Articles, paragraph 20. He also says, with 
some wit, " They set up a new idol, their Saint Sabbath." 

The doctrine of a strict Sabbath appears to have made no 
impression in Scotland until the seventeenth century was well 



Chap. I. 



Note 10, 
page 129. 



Note II, 
page 131. 



vX 



Note 12, 
page 132. 



I40 



The Puritan Mio-ration. 



Book II. 



Note 13, 
page 132. 



advanced. In the printed Burgh Records of Aberdeen from 
1570 to 1625 there is no Sabbatarian legislation in the proper 
sense ; but there are efforts to compel the people to suspend 
buying and selling fish and flesh in the market, the playing of 
outdoor games and ninepins, and the selling of liquors during 
sermon time only. Take as an example the following ordinance 
— as curious for its language as its subject— dated 4th October, 
1598, twenty-four years after Knox's death : 

" Item, The prouest, bailleis, and counsall ratefeis and ap- 
proves the statute maid obefoir, bering that na mercatt, nather of 
fische nor flesche salbe on the Sabboth day in tyme cumming, in 
tyme of sermone, vnder the pane of confiscatioun of the same ; 
and lykvayes ratefeis the statute maid aganis the playeris in the 
linkis, and at the kyillis, during the time of the sermones ; . . . 
and that na tavernar sell nor went any wyne nor aill in tyme 
cumming in tyme of sermone, ather on the Sabboth day or vlk 
dayes, under the pane of ane vnlaw of fourtie s., to be vpliftit of 
the contravenar als oft as they be convict." 

New England Puritanism took a position more ultra even 
than that of Bownd. Thomas Shepard, of Cambridge, Mass., 
developed from some Sermons on the Subject a work with the 
title. Theses Sabbaticae, or the Doctrine of the Sabbath. After 
a considerable circulation in manuscript among New England 
students of divinity, it was printed at London in 1650 by request 
of all the elders of New England. From the time of Augustine 
the prevailing theory of advocates of a Sunday-Sabbath has been 
that the fourth commandment is partly moral, partly ceremonial ; 
but Shepard, who does not stick at small logical or historical diffi- 
culties, will have it wholly moral, by which means he avoids any 
option regarding the day. The rest of the Sabbath, according to 
this authoritative New England treatise, is to be as strict as it 
ever was under Jewish law, and is to be rigidly enforced on the 
unwilling by parents and magistrates. In the spirit of a thorough- 
paced literalist Shepard argues through fifty pages that the Sab- 
bath begins in the evening. He admits that only " servile labour " 
is forbidden, but he reasons that as "sports and pastimes" are 
ordained " to whet on worldly labour," they therefore partake of 
its servile character and are not tolerable on the Sabbath. It 
appears from his preface that there were Puritans in his time who 
denied the sabbatical character of Sunday and spiritualized the 
commandment. 



CHAPTER THE SECOND. 
SEPARATISM AND THE SCROOBY CHURCH. 



I. 

To the great brotherhood of Puritans who 
formed a party within the church there was 
added a little fringe of Separatists or " Brownists," 
as they were commonly called, who did not stop 
with rejecting certain traits of the Anglican serv- 
ice, but spurned the church itself. Upon these 
ultraists fell the merciless hand of persecution. 
They were imprisoned, hanged, exiled. They were 
mostly humble people, and were never numerous ; 
but by their superior boldness in speech and writ- 
ing, by their attempts to realize actual church 
organizations on apostolic models, they rendered 
themselves considerable if not formidable. From 
this advance guard and forlorn hope of Puritanism, 
inured to hardship and the battle front, came at 
length the little band of New England pioneers 
who made a way into the wilderness over the 
dead bodies of half their company. The example 
of these contemned Brownists led to the Puritan 
settlement of New England. Their type of eccle- 
siastical organization ultimately dominated the 
Congregationalism of New England and the non- 
conformity of the mother country. For these 



Chap. II. 

Impor- 
tance of 
the Sepa- 
ratists, 



142 



Tlie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Noncon- 
formity in 
the 
Church. 



Scrambler, 
Bishop of 
Peterbor- 
ough, to 
Burghley, 
13th April, 

i573> in 
Wright's 
Elizabeth 
and her 
Times. 



reasons, if for no other, Brownism, however ob- 
scure it may have been, is not a negligible element 
in history. 

II. 

The great body of the Puritans seem to have 
agreed with Bishop Hall that it was " better to 
swallow a ceremony than to rend a church," and 
they agreed with him in regarding Separatism as 
criminal. They were, indeed, too intent on reform- 
ing the Church of England to think of leaving it. 
They made no scruple of defying ecclesiastical 
regulations when they could, but in the moral 
code of that day schism was the deadliest of sins. 

In the early part of Elizabeth's reign, before 
the beginning of the rule of Whitgift and the High 
Commission Courts, Puritan divines slighted or 
omitted the liturgy in many parishes. This be- 
came more common after the rise of Cartwright 
and the Presbyterian movement, about 1570. For 
example, in the town of Overston, in 1573, there 
was no divine service according to the Book of 
Common Prayer, " but insteade thereof two ser- 
mons be preached " by men whom the bishop had 
refused to license. The village of Whiston was 
also a place of Puritan assemblage, " where it is 
their joye," writes the Bishop of Peterborough, 
" to have manie owte of divers parishes, principal- 
lie owte of Northampton towne and Overston 
aforesaid, with other townes thereaboute, there to 
receive the sacramentes with preachers and min- 



Separatism ajid the Scrooby ChurcJi. 



143 



isters to their owne liking, and contrarie to the 
forme prescribed by the publique order of the 
realme." Thomas Rogers says, " The brethren 
(for so did they style them-selves) would neither 
pray, nor say service, nor baptize, nor celebrate 
the Lord's Supper, nor marry, nor bury, nor do 
any other ecclesiastical duty according to law." 

At this time some of the Puritan divines held 
high positions in the church. Whittingham, who 
had been on the Puritan side of the quarrels in 
Frankfort, and who had received only a Genevan 
ordination, succeeded in holding his deanery of 
Durham until his death, in 1579. I^"* ^5^3 Dr. Tur- 
ner was sneering at bishops as " white coats " and 
"tippett gentlemen," while himself Dean of Dur- 
ham. 

But Elizabeth after a while filled the bishoprics 
with men to her liking, whose heavy hands made 
the lot of Puritans in the church harder and 
harder. Many ministers were silenced, but there 
were many who, by evasion or by straining their 
consciences, held their benefices. Some Puritan 
clergymen, when they were to preach, preferred 
"to walk in the church-yard until sermon time 
rather than to be present at public praj^er." Some 
Puritan laymen had their own way of conforming 
to the church. " There is a sort of Semi Separa- 
tist," says Pagitt, as late as 1646, "that will heare 
our Sermons but not our Common-prayers; and 
of these you may see every Sunday in our streets 
sitting and standing^ about our doores ; who, when 



Chap. II. 



Rogers's 
Preface to 
Articles. 
Parker 
Soc. ed., 
p. 10. 



The Semi- 
Separa- 
tists. 



Bancroft in 
Barlowe's 
Svmme 
and Svb- 
stance. 



Heresiog- 
raphy, p. 
82. 



144 



TJie Puritan Migration. 



Book II, 



Causes of 

Separa- 

tiem. 



Thomas 
Scott in 
Pagitt, 80. 



Praj^ers are done, rush into our Churches to hear 
our Sermons." 

III. 

The growth of Separatist churches was due to 
two causes. An almost incredible reverence for 
the letter of the Scriptures had taken the place of 
older superstitions. There was a strong tendency 
to revert to the stern spirit of the Old Testament 
and to adopt the external forms of the New. Re- 
ligious idealists saw a striking contrast between the 
discipline of the primitive and almost isolated bands 
of enthusiastic believers in the apostolic time and 
the all-inclusive parishes of the hierarchical state 
church. And in that age of externalism the differ- 
ence in organic form between the Anglican church 
and the little synagogues of Christian seceders 
founded by Paul in the Levant weighed heavily 
upon the minds of earnest people. It did not oc- 
cur to them that this primitive organization was 
probably brought over from the neighboring Jew- 
ish congregations from \vhich the converts had 
withdrawn, and that there might not be any obli- 
gation to imitate it under different skies and in a 
remote age. The Separatist was an ideahst. " He 
lives by the aire," said an opponent, " and there he 
builds Castles and Churches ; none on earth will 
please him; ... he must finde out Sir Thomas 
More's Utopia, or rather Plato's Community, and 
bee an Elder there." But Separatism was un- 
doubtedly promoted by persecution. Bradford 



Separatism and the Scroohy Church. 



145 



says that the sufferings inflicted on them by the 
bishops helped some of the Puritans " to see fur- 
ther into things by the light of the word of God. 
How not only these base and beggerly ceremonies 
were unlawfull, but also that the lordly and tiran- 
ous power of the prelats ought not to be sub- 
mitted unto." Drawn thus by the letter of the 
biblical record, while stung by cruel oppression 
and galled by the opposition of the constituted 
authorities to what they deemed the truth divine, 
it is not strange that religious enthusiasts began to 
long for societies organized like those of the apos- 
tolic age, from which the profane should be ex- 
cluded by a strict discipline. 

IV. 

The beginning of Separatism has been com- 
monly attributed to Robert Browne, a contentious 
and able advocate of Separatist doctrines. After a 
brief and erratic career as an advocate of these 
opinions, and after suffering the penalty of his zeal 
and proving the sincerity of his belief in thirty-two 
different prisons, in some of which he could not see 
his hand at noonday, Browne at length began to 
waver — now inclined to return to the church, now 
recoiling toward dissent. Worn out in nerves by 
controversy and persecution, this eccentric man 
was so alarmed by a solemn sentence of excommu- 
nication from a bishop, that he repented and made 
peace with the English church. He accepted a 
benefice, but employed a curate to preach for him. 



Chap. II. 



Plimoth 
Plantation, 
p. 8. 



Robert 
Browne 
and 

Brown- 
ism. 



1581 to 
1586. 



146 



The Puritan ]\Iisrration. 



Book II. 



Note I. 



Rise of 
Separa- 
tism. 

Barclay's 
Inner Life, 
PP- 13. 53- 

Dialogue 
of 1593 
quo. by 
Wadding- 
ton. 

Bradford's 
Dialogue. 

Note 2. 



Josias 
Nichols, 
The Plea 
for the 
Innocent, 
1602, in 
Hanbury, 
i> 3- 



Browne lingered on to an unhonored age, imperi- 
ous and contentious, not able to live with his wife, 
and held in no reverence by churchmen, while he 
was despised by Separatists. He died at eighty, in 
Northampton jail, to which he had been carried on 
a feather bed laid in a cart. The old man had been 
committed to prison this thirty-third time in his 
life for striking a constable who sought to collect 
a rate. 

Separatism in some form existed before Browne's 
zeal made it a thorn in the side of the bishops. 
Something like a separation existed in 1567. In 
1 571 there was an independent church of which we 
know little but the pastor's name. Bradford even 
dates independency back to the reign of Mary. In 
truth, the rise of this sect, from which came the 
earliest New England colony, appears to be lost 
in obscurity. Significant movements are usually 
cradled in rustic mangers, to which no learned 
magi think it worth their while to journey. The 
beginning of Separatism was probably in the little 
conventicles held by devout Puritans who, in the 
words of one of their own writers, " met together 
to sing a psalm or to talk of God's word." But 
Browne, so far as we know, was one of the earliest 
to organize independent churches, with officers 
named and classified after those of the petty hier- 
archies of the early Christian congregations, or 
rather according to such deductions regarding 
them as he was able to make from the Epistles of 
Paul. Separatism, though it owed something to 



Separatism and the Scrooby Church. 



U7 



Browne's activity, was not founded by him. 
Browne's labors began about 1581, and his fiery 
career as a Brownist had lasted only four or five 
years when he began to vacillate. A great part 
of this time was spent in exile, much of it in 
prison, and very little of it about London. But 
before 15S7 London seems to have been the 
center of the Separatists, from which they had 
"sparsed their companies into severall partes of 
the Realme." 

It seems that their rise in London came from 
the devout meetings of those w4io had begun to 
repudiate the Church of England as antichristian. 
Without any officers or organization apparently, 
these people, when we first get sight of them, were 
wont to assemble in the summer time in the fields 
about London, sitting down upon a bank while the 
Bible was expounded now by one and now by an- 
other of the company. In the winter it was their 
custom to spend the whole Sunday together from 
five o'clock in the morning, eating dinner in com- 
pany and paying for it by a collection. They 
responded in prayer only by spontaneous groans 
or sobs, much after the fashion of the early Qua- 
kers, Methodists, and other enthusiasts of a later 
time. If one of their members returned to a parish 
assembly, they pronounced him an apostate and 
solemnly delivered him over to Satan until he 
should repent. 



Chap. II. 



Stephen 
Bread well, 
1588, in 
Dexter, 
255- 



H. M. Dex- 
ter's Con- 
gregation- 
alism, 255- 
257. 



148 



Tlie Puritan Mijrration. 



Book II. 



Barrow- 
ism, 



Separa- 
tists in 
Amster- 
dam, 1593. 



When they began to organize themselves for- 
mally into a church the London Separatists in their 
turn resorted to the apostolic epistles. These had 
already been treated like the magician's bottle that 
is made to yield white wine or red at pleasure. 
From them whatsoever form of discipline was de- 
sired by Anglican, Presbyterian, or Brownist had 
been derived, and now a still different discipline 
was deduced, a mean betwixt Presbyterian and 
Brownist theories. This is knov/n now as Bar- 
rowism. It was the form of church government 
brought by the Pilgrims to Plymouth, and sub- 
stantially that which prevailed in New England 
throughout the seventeenth centur3^ 

The London Separatists suffered miserably from 
persecution. Many of them languished and died 
in prison. Barrow and Greenwood, their leaders, 
were hanged at Tyburn. A part of them migrated 
to Amsterdam, while the rest maintained a furtive 
church in London. Those in Amsterdam, having 
no lingering abuses of the English church to re- 
form, set every man's conscience to watch his 
neighbor's conduct. Having- seceded from the 
communion of the Church of England on account 
of scandals, they were scandalized with the least 
variation from their rigorous standard by any of 
their own church members, and they were soon 
torn asunder with dissensions as the result of this 
vicariousness of conscience. The innocent vanity 




5c"«*'xy! 



crty-.iir 



-,5«>n<'t««'«ii'lb 



Separatism and the Scrooby Church. 



149 



of the pastor's wife who could never forego a 
" toppish " hat and high-heeled shoes was the prin- 
cipal stumbling-block. 

Though Separatism had been almost extirpated 
from England by the close of Elizabeth's reign, 
there remained even yet one vigorous society in 
the north which was destined to exert a remark- 
able influence on the course of history. 

VI. 

On the southern margin of Yorkshire the 
traveler alights to-day at the station of Bawtry. 
It is an uninteresting village, with a rustic inn. 
More than a mile to the southward, in Nottingham- 
shire, lies the pleasant but commonplace village of 
Scrooby. About a mile to the north of Bawtry is 
Austerfield, a hamlet of brick cottages crowded to- 
gether along the road. It has a picturesque little 
church built in the middle ages, the walls of which 
are three feet thick. This church will seat some- 
thing more than a hundred people nowadays by 
the aid of a rather modern extension. In the sev- 
enteenth century it was smaller, and there was no 
ceiling. Then one could see the rafters of the 
roof while shuddering with cold in the grottolike 
interior. The country around is level and un- 
picturesque. 

But one is here in the cradle of great religious 
movements. In Scrooby and in Austerfield were 
born the Pilgrims who made the first successful 
settlement in New England. A little to the east 



Chap. II, 



The cradle 
of the Pil- 
grims. 



150 



The Puritan Mijrration. 



Book II. 



Hunter's 
Founders 
of New 
Plymouth, 
24. 25. 



lies Gainsborough, from which migrated to Hol- 
land in 1606 the saintly Separatist John Smyth, who 
gave form to a great Baptist movement of modern 
times. A few miles to the northeast of Bawtry, in 
Lincolnshire, lies Epworth, the nest from which the 
Wesleys issued more than a hundred years later to 
spread Methodism over the world. Religious zeal 
seems to have characterized the people of this 
region even before the Reformation, for the country 
round about Scrooby was occupied at that time by 
an unusual number of religious houses. 

The little Austerfield church and the old church 
at Scrooby are the only picturesque or romantic 
elements of the environment, and on these churches 
the Pilgrims turned their backs as though they had 
been temples of Baal. In the single street of Aus- 
terfield the traveler meets the cottagers of to-day, 
and essays to talk with them. They are heavy and 
somewhat stolid, like most other rustic people in 
the north country, and an accent to which their 
ears are not accustomed amuses and puzzles them. 
No tradition of the Pilgrims lingers among them. 
They have never heard that anybody ever went 
out of Austerfield to do anything historical. They 
listen with a bovine surprise if you speak to them 
of this exodus, and they refer you to the old clerk 
of the parish, who will know about it. The vener- 
able clerk is a striking figure, not unlike that parish 
clerk painted by Gainsborough. This oracle of 
the hamlet knows that Americans come here as on 
a pilgrimage, and he tells you that one of them, a 



Separatism and the Scrooby Church. 



151 



descendant of Governor Bradford, offered a con- 
siderable sum for the disused stone font at which 
Bradford the Pilgrim was baptized. But the 
traveler turns away at length from the rustic folk 
of Austerfield and the beer-drinkers over their 
mugs in the inn at Bawtry, and the villagers at 
Scrooby, benumbed by that sense of utter common- 
placeness which is left on the mind of a stranger 
by such an agricultural community. The Pilgrims, 
then, concerning whom poems have been written, 
and in whose honor orations without number have 
been made, were just common country folk like these, 
trudging through wheat fields and along the muddy 
clay highways of the days of Elizabeth and James. 
They were just such men as these and they were 
not. They were such as these would be if they 
were vivified by enthusiasm. We may laugh at 
superfluous scruples in rustic minds, but none will 
smile at brave and stubborn loyalty to an idea 
when it produces such steadfast courage as that 
of the Pilgrims. 

And yet, when the traveler has resumed his 
journey, and recalls Scrooby and Bawtry and Aus- 
terfield, the stolid men and gossiping women, the 
narrow pursuits of the plowman and the reaper, 
and remembers the flat, naked, and depressing 
landscape, he is beset by the old skepticism about 
the coming of anything good out of Nazareth. 
Nor is he helped by remembering that at the time 
of Bradford's christening at the old stone font the 
inhabitants of Austerfield are said to have been " a 



Chap. II. 



152 



The Purita7i Mis:ration, 



Book II. 

Magnalia, 
Book II, 
chap, i, 
p. 2, 



Elder 
Brewster. 



Itinerary, 
i, 36, in 

Hunter's 
Founders, 
p. 20. 



most ignorant and licentious people," and that 
earlier in that same century John Leland speaks of 
" the meane townlet of Scrooby." 

VIII. 

But Leland's description of the village sug- 
gests the influence that caused Scrooby and the 
wheat fields thereabout to send forth, in the be- 
ofinning: of the seventeenth centurv and of a new 
reign, men capable of courage and fortitude suffi- 
cient to make them memorable, and to make these 
three townlets places of pilgrimage in following 
centuries. 

" In the meane townlet of Scrooby, I marked 
two things " — it is Leland who writes — " the parish 
church not big but very well builded ; the second 
was a great manor-place, standing within a moat, 
and longing to the Archbishop of York." This 
large old manor-place he describes with its outer 
and inner court. In this manor-place, about half a 
century after Leland saw it, there lived William 
Brewster. He was a man of education, who had 
been for a short time in residence at Cambridge ; 
he had served as one of the under secretaries of 
state for years ; had been trusted beyond all others 
by Secretary Davison, his patron ; and, when Eliza- 
beth disgraced Davison, in order to avoid respon- 
sibility for the death of Mary of Scotland, Brewster 
had been the one friend who clung to the fallen 
secretary as long as there was opportunity to do 
him service. Making no further effort to establish 



Separatisjn and the Scrooby CJiiirch. 



153 



himself at court, Brewster went after a while " to 
live in the country in good esteeme amongst his 
freinds and the good gentle-men of those parts, 
espetially the godly and religious." His abode 
after his retirement was the old manor-place now 
destroyed, but then the most conspicuous building 
at Scrooby. It belonged in his time to Sir Samuel 
Sandys, the elder brother of Sir Edwin Sandys, 
whose work as the master spirit in the later his- 
tory of the Virginia Company has already been 
recounted. At Scrooby Brewster succeeded his 
father in the office of " Post," an office that obliged 
him to receive and deliver letters for a wide 
district of country, to keep relays of horses for 
travelers by post on the great route to the north, 
and to furnish inn accommodations. In the master 
of the post at Scrooby we have the first of those 
influences that lifted a group of people from this 
rustic region into historic importance. He had 
been acquainted with the great world, and had 
borne a responsible if not a conspicuous part in 
delicate diplomatic affairs in the Netherlands. At 
court, as at Scrooby, he was a Puritan, and now in 
his retirement his energies were devoted to the 
promotion of religion. He secured earnest minis- 
ters for many of the neighboring parishes. But 
that which he builded the authorities tore down. 
Whitgift was archbishop, and the High Commis- 
sion Courts were proceeding against Puritans with 
the energy of the Spanish Inquisition. " The 
godly preachers" about him were silenced. The 



Chap. II. 

Bradford, 
410. 



Supra, 
Book I, 
chap, ii, iii. 



154 



The Puritan Mijrration. 



Book II, 



Plimoth 
Planta- 
tions, 411. 



The 

Scrooby 

Church. 



Magnalia, 
Book II, 
c. i, 2. 



people who followed them were proscribed, and 
all the pains and expense of Brewster and his 
Puritan friends in establishing- religion as they 
understood it were likely to be rendered futile by 
the governors of the church. " He and many 
more of those times begane to looke further into 
things," says Bradford. Persecution begot Sepa- 
ratism. The theory was the result of conditions, 
as new theories are wont to be. 

IX. 

Here, as elsewhere, the secession appears to 
have begun with meetings for devotion. By this 
supposition we may reconcile two dates which 
have been supposed to conflict, conjecturing that 
in 1602, when Brewster had lived about fifteen 
years in the old manor-house, his neighbors, who 
did not care to attend the ministry of ignorant and 
licentious priests, began to spend whole Sundaj's 
together, now in one place and now in another, 
but most frequently in the old manor-house 
builded within a moat, and reached by ascending 
a flight of stone steps. Here, Brewster's hospi- 
tality was dispensed to them freely. They may 
or may not have been members of the Separatist 
church at Gainsborough, as some have supposed. 
It was not until 1606 that these people formed 
the fully organized Separatist church of Scrooby. 
It was organized after the Barrowist pattern 
that had originated in London — it was after a 
divine pattern, according to their belief. Brew- 



Separatism and the Scrooby CJnircJi. 



155 



ster, the nucleus of the church, became their ruling 
elder. 

It was in these all-day meetings at the old 
manor-house that the Separatist rustics of Scrooby 
were molded for suffering and endeavor. The 
humble, modest, and conscientious Brewster was 
the king-post of the new church — the first and 
longest enduring of the influences that shaped the 
character of these people in England, Holland, and 
America. Brewster could probably have returned 
to the court under other auspices after Davison's 
fall, but as master of the post at Scrooby, then as 
a teacher and as founder of a printing ofhce of 
prohibited English books in Leyden, and finally as 
a settler in the wilderness, inuring his soft hands 
to rude toils, until he died in his cabin an octogena- 
rian, he led a life strangely different from that of a 
courtier. But no career possible to him at court 
could have been so useful or so long remembered. 

X. 

But Brewster was not the master spirit. About 
the time the Separatists of Scrooby completed 
their church organization, in 1606, there came to 
it John Robinson. He had been a fellow of Em- 
manuel College, Cambridge, and a beneficed cler- 
gyman of Puritan views. He, too, had been slowly 
propelled to Separatist opinion by persecution. 
For fourteen years before the final migration he 
led the Pilgrims at Scrooby and Leyden. Wise 
man of affairs, he directed his people even in their 



Chap. II. 



The ruling 
elder. 



Bradford's 
Plimoth 
Plantation, 
408-414. 
Hunter's 
Founders, 
passim. 
Winsor's 
Elder 
William 
Brewster, a 
pamphlet. 
F. B. Dex- 
ter in 
Narrative 
and Grit. 
Hist., iii, 
257-282. 



John Rob- 
inson, 



156 



The Puritan Mi(rration. 



hard struggle for bread in a foreign country. 
He was one of the few men, in that age of debate 
about husks and shells, who penetrated to those 
teachings concerning character and conduct which 
are the vital and imperishable elements of religion. 
Even when assailed most roughly in debate he 
was magnanimous and forbearing. He avoided 
the bigotry and bitterness of the early Brownists, 
and outgrew as years went on the narrowness of 
rigid Separatism. He lived on the best terms with 
the Dutch and French churches. He opposed 
rather the substantial abuses than the ceremonies 
of the Church of England, and as life advanced 
he came to extend a hearty fellowship and com- 
munion to good men in that church. Had it been 
his lot to remain in the national church and rise, 
as did his opponent, Joseph Hall, to the pedestal 
of a bishopric or to other dignity, he would have 
been one of the most illustrious divines of the age 
— wanting something of the statesmanly breadth 
of Hooker, but quite outspreading and overtop- 
ping the Whitgifts, Bancrofts, and perhaps even 
the Halls. Robert Baillie, who could say many 
hard things against Separatists, is forced to confess 
that " Robinson was a man of excellent parts, and 
the most learned, polished, and modest spirit that 
ever separated from the Church of England " ; and 
long after his death the Dutch theologian Horn- 
beeck recalls again and again his integrity, learn- 
ing, and modesty. 

Shall we say that when subjected to this great 



Separatism and the Scrooby CJiurch. 



157 



man's influence the rustics of Scrooby and Bawtry 
and Austerfield were clowns no longer? Perhaps 
we shall be truer to the probabilities of human 
nature if we conclude that Robinson was able to 
mold a few of the best of them to great uses, and 
that these became the significant digits which gave 
value to the ciphers. 

Elucidations. 

The eccentricities, moral and mental, of Browne were a con- 
stant resource of those who sought to involve all Separatists in 
his disgrace. Odium has always been a more effective weapon 
than argument in a theological controversy. Browne's enemies 
alleged that even while on the gridiron of persecution his conduct 
had not been free from moral obliquity. I have not been able to 
see Bernard's charges on this score, but John Robinson, in his 
Justification, etc. (16 10), parries the thrust in these words : " Now 
as touching Browne, it is true as Mr. B[ernard] afifirmeth, that as 
he forsook the Lord so the Lord forsook him in his way ; ... as 
for the wicked things (which Mr. B. affirmeth) he did in the way 
it may well be as he sayeth, ... as the more like he was to re- 
turne to his proper centre the Church of England, where he 
should be sure to find companie ynough in any wickednesse." 
Edition of 1639, p. 50. One of the most learned accounts of 
Browne is to be found in H. M. Dexter's Congregationalism, the 
lecture on Robert Browne. It is always easy to admire Dr. 
Dexter's erudition, but not so easy to assent to his conclusions. 
See also Pagitt's Heresiography, p, 56 and passim ; Fuller's 
Church History, ix, vi, 1-7 ; and Hanbury's Memorials, p. 18 and 
following. 

John Robinson, in Justification of Separation from the Church 
of England, p. 50, edition of 1639, says : " It is true that Boulton 
was (though not the first in that way) an elder of a Separatist 
church in the beginning of Queen Elizabeth's dayes, and falling 
from his holy profession recanted the same at Paul's Crosse and 
afterwards hung himself as Judas did." Compare Cotton's The 
Way of the Congregationall Churches Cleared, p. 4, and various j 



Chap. II. 



Note I, 
page 146. 



Note 2, 
page 146. 



158 



The Puritan Mis:ration. 



Book II. 



Note 3, 
page 156. 



intimations in Hanbury's Memorials, which imply the existence 
of Independent congregations in London and elsewhere in the 
early years of Elizabeth's reign. But Hanbury's handling of the 
valuable material he collected with commendable assiduity is 
sometimes so clumsy that the reader is obliged to grope for facts 
bearing upon most important questions. One gets from Han- 
bury's notes and some older publications a vague notion that the 
Flemish Protestants, recently settled in England in great numbers, 
exerted an influence in favor of Independency. Robert Browne 
began his secession in Norwich, a place where the people from 
the Low Countries were nearly half the population, and Browne 
was even said to have labored among the Dutch first. Fuller, 
ix, sec. vi, 2. 

Robinson's character may be judged from his works. His 
good qualities are very apparent in the wise and tender letters ad- 
dressed to the Pilgrims when they were leaving England and after 
their arrival at Plymouth, w^hich will be found in Bradford's 
Plimoth Plantations, 63, 64, 163. See Bradford's character of him, 
ibid., 17-19. See also Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrims, 473-482. 
Ainsworth's tribute is in Hanbury's Memorials, 95. See also 
Winslow's Brief Narration in Young's Chronicles, 379. George 
Sumner, in 3d Massachusetts Historical Collections, ix, has a 
paper giving the result of his investigations in Leyden. He 
quotes Hornbeeck as saying, twenty-eight years after Robinson's 
death, that he was the best of all the exiles as well as the most 
upright, learned, and most modest. Hornbeeck's words are : 
" Optimus inter illos." " Vir supra reliquos probus atque em- 
ditus." " Doctissimi ac modestissim.i omnium separatistorum." 



CHAPTER THE THIRD. 

THE PILGRIM MIGRATIONS. 



The accession of James of Scotland to the 
English throne in 1603 raised the hopes of the 
Puritans. James had said, in 1590: "As for our 
neighbour kirk of England, their service is an ill- 
said masse in English ; they want nothing of the 
masse but the liftings." Later, when the prospect 
of his accession to the English throne was immi- 
nent, James had spoken with a different voice, but 
the Puritans remembered his lifelong familiarity 
with Presbyterian forms, and his strongly ex- 
pressed satisfaction with the Scottish Kirk. They 
met him on his way to London with a peti- 
tion for modifications of the service. This was 
known as the Millinary Petition, because it was 
supposed to represent the views of about one thou- 
sand English divines. 

In January, 1604, the king held a formal confer- 
ence at Hampton Court between eleven of the 
Anglican party on one side, nine of them being 
bishops, and four Puritan divines, representing the 
petitioners. Assuming at first the air of playing 
the arbiter, James, who dearly loved a puttering 
theological debate, could not refrain from taking 

159 



Chap. III. 

Accession 
of James I. 



Neal, ii, 28. 
Compare 
Burns's 
Piel. Diss, 
to Wod- 
row, Ixxiv. 



Hampton 
Court con- 
ference. 



i6o 



TJie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 

Svmme 
and Svb- 
stance, 
passim. 



Prel. Diss, 
to Wod- 
row, Ixxiv. 



Ch. Hist., 
X, vii, 30. 



the cause of the churchmen out of their hands and 
arguing it himself. The reports of the conference 
are most interesting as showing the paradoxical 
qualities of James, who, by his action at this meet- 
ing, unwittingly made himself a conspicuous fig- 
ure in the history of America. The great church- 
men were surprised at the display made by the 
king of dialectic skill. They held Scotch learning 
in some contempt, and were amazed that one bred 
among the " Puritans " should know how to handle 
questions of theology so aptly. James, though 
he had declared the Church of Scotland " the 
sincerest kirk in the world " because it did not 
keep Easter and Yule as the Genevans did, now 
had the face to assure the prelates that he had 
never believed after he was ten years old what 
he was taught in Scotland. His speeches in 
the conference are marked by ability, mingled 
with the folly which vitiated all his qualities. 
Quick at reply and keen in analysis, he even shows 
something like breadth of intelligence, or at least 
intellectual toleration, but without ever for a mo- 
ment evincing any liberality of feeling. His mani- 
fest cleverness is rendered futile by his narrow and 
ridiculous egotism, his arrogance in the treatment 
of opponents, and his coarse vulgarity in expres- 
sion. " In common speaking as in his hunting," 
says Fuller, " he stood not on the cleanest but near- 
est way." The Puritans were no more able to 
answer the arguments of the king than was ^^Esop's 
lamb to make reply to the wolf. Laying down for 



TJie Pilgrim Migrations. 



i6i 



his fundamental maxim " No bishop, no kino-," he 
drew a picture of the troubles that would beset him 
when " Jack and Tom and Will and Dick " should 
meet and censure the king and his council. He 
would have no such assemblage of the clergy until 
he should grow fat and pursy and need trouble to 
keep him in breath, he said. It could not occur to 
his self-centered mind that so grave a question was 
not to be settled merely by considering the ease 
and convenience of the sovereign. " He rather 
usede upbraidinges than argumente," says Har- 
rington, who was present. He bade the Puritans 
"awaie with their snivellinge," and, in discussing 
the surplice, made an allusion that would be 
deemed a profanation by reverent churchmen of 
the present time. 

With characteristic pedantry he spoke part of 
the time in Latin, and his clever refutation of the 
hapless Puritans sounded like the wisdom of God 
to the anxious bishops. In spite of the downright 
scolding and vulgar abuse with which the king 
flavored his orthodoxy, the aged Whitgift declared 
that undoubtedly his Majesty spoke by the special 
assistance of God's Spirit ; but one of the worldly 
bystanders ventured, in defiance of the episcopal 
dictum, to think that whatever spirit inspired the 
king was "rather foul-mouthed." Bancroft, Bishop 
of London, theatrically fell on his knees and sol- 
emnly protested that his heart melted within him 
with joy that Almighty God of his singular mercy 
had given them such a king "as since Christ's 



Chap. III. 



AntiquJe., 
i, i8i. 



The king 
and the 
bishops. 



1 62 



The Puritati ]Mis;ration. 



Book II. 
Note I. 



Compare 
Nugse An- 
tiquas, ii, 
25, 26. 



Results. 

Svmme 
and Svb- 
stance, 35. 



Compare 
Bacon's 
Certain 
Considera- 
tions 
touching 
the better 
Pacifica- 
tion of the 
Church of 
England. 



time the like hath not been seen." The king- 
in his turn was naturally impressed with the sa- 
gacity of a bishop who could so devoutly admire 
his Majesty's ability, and, when soon afterward a 
fresh access of paralysis carried off Whitgift, it was 
not surprising that Bancroft should be translated 
from London to Canterbury over the heads of 
worthier competitors. From the moment of Ban- 
croft's accession to the primacy the lot of the Puri- 
tans and Separatists became harder, for he plumed 
himself doubtless on being the originator of the 
high-church doctrine, and he was a man whose 
harsh energy seems not to have been tempered by 
an intimate piety like that of Whitgift. 

When James rose from his chair at the close of 
the debate on the second day he said, " I shall make 
them confoi-m themselves, or I will harry them out 
of this land, or else do worse " ; and he wrote to a 
friend boasting that he had " peppered the Puritans 
soundly." But the king had missed, without know- 
ing it, the greatest opportunity of his reign — an 
opportunity for conciliating or weakening the Puri- 
tan opposition, and consolidating the church and 
his kingdom. James could think of nothing but 
his own display of cleverness and browbeating 
arrogance in a dispute with great divines like Rey- 
nolds and Chaderton. The conference had been 
for him a recreation not much more serious than 
stag-hunting. That it was pregnant with vast and 
far-reaching results for good and evil in England 
and the New World he, perhaps, did not dream. 



The Pilgrim Migrations. 



163 



By his narrow and selfish course at this critical 
moment he may be said to have sealed the fate of 
his son, if not the doom of his dynasty ; and his 
clever folly gave fresh life to the bitter struggle 
between Anglican and Puritan which resulted in 
the peopling of New England a quarter of a cen- 
tury afterward. 

II. 

Every proscription of the Puritans within the 
church was accompanied by a crusade against the 
Brownists without, who were counted sinners 
above all other men. Though Ralegh in 1593 had 
estimated the Brownists at twenty thousand, they 
were by this time in consequence of oppression 
"about worn out," as Bacon said. Upon those 
who remained the new persecution broke with un- 
tempered severity. Badgered on every side by 
that vexatious harrying which King James and his 
ecclesiastics kept up according to promise, the little 
congregation at Scrooby in 1607 resolved to flee 
into Holland, where they would be strangers to 
the speech and to the modes of getting a living, 
but where they might worship God in extempo- 
rary prayers under the guidance of elders of their 
own choice without fear of fines and prisons. 

That which is most honorable to the Low Coun- 
tries, from a historical point of view, namely, that 
their cities were places of refuge for oppressed 
consciences, was esteemed odious and highly ridic- 
ulous in the seventeenth century. In one of the 



Chap. III. 



The storm 
of persecu- 
tion. 



Bacon's 
Observa- 
tion on a 
Libel. 



Toleration 
in the Low 
Countries. 



164 



TJie Puritan Miscration. 



Book II. 



Errours 
and Indura- 
tion, p. 27. 



Flight of 
the Pil- 
grims. 



The Pil- 
grims in 
Amster- 
dam. 



pla3'S of that time there is a humorous proposition 
to hold a consultation about " erecting four new 
sects of religion in Amsterdam." The Dutch me- 
tropolis was called a cage of unclean birds, and a 
French prelate contemned it as " a common harbor 
of all opinions and heresies." At a later period 
Edward Johnson, the rather bloodthirsty Massa- 
chusetts Puritan, inveighs against " the great min- 
gle mangle of religion " in Holland, and like a 
burlesque prophet shrieks, "Ye Dutch, come out 
of your hodge podge ! " Robert Baylie, in a ser- 
mon before the House of Lords as late as 1645, 
says of the toleration by the Dutch, that " for this 
one thing they have become infamous in the Chris- 
tian world." 

To the asylum offered by the Low Countries 
the Scrooby Separatists resolved to flee. The 
pack of harriers let loose by James and Bancroft 
were in full cry. The members of the Scrooby 
church found themselves " hunted and persecuted 
on every side," having their houses watched night 
and day, so that all their sufferings in times past 
" were but as flea bitings in comparison." But the 
tyranny that made England intolerable did its best 
to render flight impossible. In various essays to 
escape, the Separatists were arrested and stripped 
of what valuables they had, while their leaders 
were cast into prison for months at a time. 

At length by one means or another the mem- 
bers of this battered little community got away 
and met together in Amsterdam. To plain north 



TJie Pilgrim Migrations. 



165 



country folk this was indeed a strange land, and 
one can see in the vivid and eloquent language of 
Bradford of Austerfield, who was a young man 
when he crossed the German Ocean, the memory 
of the impressions which these cities of the Low 
Countries made on their rustic minds. But "it 
was not longe before they saw the grimme and 
grisly face of povertie coming upon them like an 
armed man, with whom they must bukle and in- 
counter." 

III. 

Robinson discovered that he was not of a piece 
with those Separatists who had preceded him to 
Amsterdam. In one division of these, questions of 
whalebone in bodices, of high-heeled shoes and 
women's hats, distracted scrupulous minds. In the 
other, which came from the same part of Eng- 
land as Robinson's church, the agitations were 
of a theological nature. Questions about the 
baptism of infants and the inherent righteous- 
ness of man and the portion of his nature that 
Christ derived from his mother, with discussions 
of the right of a man to be a magistrate and a 
church member at the same time, were seething in 
the heated brain of the scrupulous but saintly pas- 
tor. Robinson saw that these controversies would 
involve the Scrooby church if it remained in Am- 
sterdam. In Robinson the centrifugal force of 
Separatism had already spent itself, and his prac- 
tical wisdom had set bounds to the course of his 



Chap. III. 



Bradford's 
Plimoth 
Plantation 
16. 



Removal 
toLeyden. 



1 66 



TJie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Bradford's 

Plimoth 

Plantation. 

Winslow's 

Relation. 



Danger of 
extinc- 
tion. 



logic. To leave the Dutch metropolis for a small- 
er place was to reduce the Scrooby exiles to still 
deeper poverty, but nevertheless the Pilgrims fled 
from discord as they had fled from persecution, 
and removed to the university city of Leyden, 
called by its admirers "the Athens of the Occi- 
dent." After their departure English Separatism 
in Amsterdam went on tearing itself to pieces in a 
sincere endeavor to find ultimate theological truth, 
but Robinson's people in spite of their poverty 
were united, and were honored by those among 
whom they sojourned. Others, hearing of their 
good report, came to them from England, and the 
exiled church of Le3'den was fairly prosperous. 

IV. 

But when ten years of exile had passed the out- 
look was not a pleasant one. The life in Lej^den 
was so hard that many chose to return to their 
own land, preferring English prisons to liberty at 
so dear a rate. The " tender hearts of many a lov- 
ing father and mother " were wounded to see chil- 
dren growing prematurely decrepit under the 
weight of hard and incessant toil ; " the vigor of 
Nature being consumed in the very bud as it 
were." Some of the young people were contami- 
nated by the dissoluteness of the cit}-, others joined 
the Dutch army or made long voyages at sea, ac- 
quiring habits very foreign to the strictness of 
their parents. The result of a contest between the 
rigid Puritanism of the little church and the laxity 



The PiIo;riin Mie^rations. 



167 



prevalent in Holland was not to be doubted. Hu- 
man nature can not remain always at concert pitch. 
Intermarriages with the Dutch had already begun, 
and all that was peculiar in the English commu- 
nity was about to be swallowed up and lost for- 
ever in the great current of Dutch life which 
flowed about it. 

Puritanism was in its very nature aggressive, 
even meddlesome. It was not possible for a Puritan 
church, led by such men as Robinson, and Brew- 
ster, and Carver, and Bradford, and Winslow, to 
remain content where national prejudices and a 
difference in language barred the way to the exer- 
tion of influence on the life about them. With de- 
struction by absorption threatening their church, 
these leaders conceived the project of forming a 
new state where they '' might, with the liberty of a 
good conscience, enjoy the pure Scripture worship 
of God without the mixture of human inventions 
and impositions ; and their children after them 
might walk in the holy ways of the Lord." 



What suggested in 16 17 the thought of migra- 
tion to America we do not know. Just twenty 
years earlier, in 1597, some imprisoned Brownists 
had petitioned the Privy Council that they might be 
allowed to settle " in the province of Canada," an 
indefinite term at that time. Francis Johnson with 
three others went out in that same year to look at 
the land. The voyage was an unlucky one, and 



Chap. III. 



Emigra- 
tion 
planned. 



Compare 
Winslow 
in Young, 
387. 



Puritans 
and Amer- 
ican set- 
tlements. 



Wadding- 
ton's Cong. 
Hist., ii, 
113, 114. 



1 68 



TJie Puritan ]\Iigration. 



Book II. 



Note 2. 



Condition 
of Vir- 
ginia. 



Note 3. 



the settlement of Johnson as pastor of the church 
in Amsterdam was the result. The persecutions 
which followed the accession of Bancroft to the 
archbishopric had started as early as 1608 a wide- 
spread agitation among the Puritans in favor ot 
emigration to Virginia, but, when only a few had 
got away, the primate secured a proclamation pre- 
venting their escape from the means of grace pro- 
vided for them in Courts of High Commission. 

The year 1617, in which the agitation for emi- 
gration began among the Pilgrims, was the year 
after Dale's return with highly colored reports of 
the condition of the Virginia colony. It is notice- 
able that among the books owned by Elder Brew- 
ster at his death was a copy of Whitaker's Good 
Newes from Virginia, published in 161 3. Whitaker 
was minister at Henrico in Virginia, and was the 
son of a Puritan divine of eminence who was 
master of St. John's College, Cambridge. It is 
possible that he was known to Brewster, who had 
been at Cambridge, or to Robinson, who had re- 
signed a fellowship there to become a Separatist. 
Whitaker himself was Puritan enough to discard the 
surplice. His Good Newes is an earnest plea for the 
support of the colony for religious reasons. " This 
plantation which the divell hath so often troden 
downe," he says, "is revived and daily groweth to 
more and hopeful successe." At the very time 
when the Pilgrims first thought of migrating there 
was beginning a new and Avidespread interest in 
Virginia. This was based partly on religious en- 



The Pilgrim Migrations. 



169 



thusiasm, such as Whitaker's book was meant to 
foster, and partly on the hope of new and strange 
commodities, particularly silk. Even this silk illu- 
sion may have had its weight in a secondary way 
with the Leyden people, for Bradford, afterward 
governor at Plymouth, was a silk- weaver in Ley- 
den, and there were two books on silkworms in 
Brewster's library at his death. 

To European eyes all America was one ; even 
to-day the two Americas are hardly distinguished 
by most people in Europe. The glowing account 
of Guiana given by Ralegh helped to feed the new 
desire for an American home ; and it was only 
after serious debate that North America was 
chosen, as more remote from the dreaded Spaniard 
and safer from tropical diseases. One can hardly 
imagine what American Puritanism would have 
become under the skies of Guiana. Not only did 
the Pilgrims hesitate regarding their destination, 
but there was a choice of nationalities to be made. 
England had not been a motherly mother to these 
outcast children, and there was question of set- 
tling as English subjects in America, or becoming 
Dutch colonists there. 

VI. 

The Pilgrims preferred to be English, notwith- 
standing all. But they wished to stipulate with 
England for religious liberty. In this matter they 
had recourse to Sir Edwin Sandys, the one man 
who would probably be both able and willing to 



Chap. III. 



Inventory 
of books. 
Winsor's 
pamphlet 
on Elder 
Brewster. 



Alterna- 
tives. 



Applica- 
tion to 
Sandys. 



170 



The Puritan Mizration. 



Book II. 

Hunter's 
Founders 
of New 
Plymouth, 
pp. 22, 23. 



Failure to 
secure for- 
mal tolera- 
tion. 



help them. Brewster had lived, as we have seen, 
in an old episcopal manor at Scrooby. Sandys, 
Archbishop of York, had transferred this manor by 
a lease to his eldest son, Sir Samuel Sandys, who 
was Brewster's landlord and brother of Sir Edwin 
Sandys. Of Sir Edwin the great liberal parlia- 
mentary statesman. Fuller says, " He was right- 
handed to any great employment." In 1617 he 
was already the most influential of the progressive 
leaders of the Virginia Company, its acting though 
not yet its nominal head, and in 1619 he was elected 
governor of the Company. Brewster's fellow-sec- 
retary under Davison was a chosen friend of San- 
dys, and, in view of both these connections, we 
may consider it almost certain that the two were 
not strangers. To Sir Edwin Sandys was due 
much of the new interest in Virginia. He and his 
group seem to have been already striving to shape 
the colony into a liberal state. 

To meet the views of the Leyden people, 
Sandys endeavored by the intervention of a more 
acceptable courtier to gain assurance from the 
king, under the broad seal, that their religion 
should be tolerated if they migrated to Virginia. 
But James's peculiar conscience recoiled from this. 
He intimated that he would wink at their practices 
but he would not tolerate them by public act. 
And, indeed, the Pilgrims reflected afterward that 
" a scale as broad as the house flore would not 
serve the turne " of holding James to his promise. 
At the king's suggestion the archbishops were ap- 



The Pilgrim Migrations. 



171 



plied to, but neither would they formally approve 
such an arrangement. Nor can one wonder at 
their unwillingness, since the most profound, lib- 
eral, and far-seeing thinker of that age. Lord 
Bacon himself, was so far subject to the prejudices 
of his time that he could protest against allowing 
heretics to settle a colony, and could support his 
position by a mystical argument fit to be advanced 
by the most fantastic theologian. " It will make 
schism and rent in Christ's coat, which must be 
seamless," he says. He even goes so far as to 
group Separatists with outlaws and criminals, and 
to advise that if such should transplant themselves 
to the colonies they should be " sent for back upon 
the first notice," for "such persons are not fit to 
lay the foundation of a new colony." Much more 
fit than is a speculative philosopher to draw the 
lines on which practical undertakings are to be car- 
ried forward. The transplanting of English speech 
and institutions to America would have languished 
as French colonization did, if none but orthodox 
settlers had been allowed to fell trees and build 
cabins in the forest. Ever since the age of stone 
hatchets colony planters have been drawn from the 
ranks of the uneasy. An early Quaker governor 
of South Carolina puts the matter less elegantly 
but more justly than Bacon when he says : " It is 
stupendious to consider, how passionate and pre- 
posterous zeal, not only vails but stupefies often- 
times the Rational Powers : For cannot Dissenters 
kill Wolves and Bears as well as Churchmen ? " 



Chap. Ill, 



Bacon's 
Advice to 
Villiers. 



Archdale's 

Carolina, 

26. 



172 



The Puritan Misrraiio)i. 



Book II. 



Relations 
with the 
Virginia 
Company. 



MS. Rec. 
Va. Co., 
Feb. 2, 
1620. 



Winslow's 

Briefe 

Narration, 

Young, 

383. 



VII. 

The liberal and practical mind of Sir Edwin 
Sandys harbored none of the scruples of Bacon, 
and his more wholesome conscience knew nothing 
of the fine distinctions of James and the arch- 
bishops between formal toleration and a mere 
winking at irregularities. He embraced the cause 
of the Pilgrims and became their steadfast friend, 
passing through the Virginia Company successively 
two charters in their behalf, and the general order 
which allowed the leaders of "particular planta- 
tions " — that is, of such plantations as the Leyden 
people and others at that time proposed to make — 
to associate the sober and discreet of the plantation 
with them to make laws, orders, and constitutions 
not repugnant to the laws of England. This was a 
wide door opening toward democratic government. 
The patent given to the Pilgrims was also a liberal 
one, and it was even proposed to put into their 
hands a large sum of money contributed anony- 
mously for the education of Indian children, but to 
this it was objected that the newcomers would 
lack the confidence of the savages. One of the 
Virginia Company, possibly Sandys himself, lent 
to the Leyden people three hundred pounds v/ith- 
out interest for three years. When we consider 
that the Pilgrims had to pay in their first year of 
settlement thirty and even fifty per cent, interest 
on their debts, and that this three hundred pounds, 
the use of which they received w^ithout interest, 



The Pilzrim Migrations. 



1/3 



would be equal in purchasing power to five or six 
thousand dollars of our money, we may readily be- 
lieve that this loan and the semi-independence 
offered them under their "large patent" from the 
company, were the considerations that decided 
them in favor of emigration after the English Gov- 
ernment had refused a guarantee of toleration, 
and the Dutch Government had declined to assure 
them of protection against England. 

That group of liberal English statesmen who 
were charged with keeping " a school of sedition " 
in the courts of the Virginian Company founded 
the two centers of liberal institutions in America. 
The Earl of Southampton, the Ferrars, Sir John 
Danvers, and above all and more than all. Sir 
Edwin Sandys, were the fathers of representative 
government in New England by the charter of 
February 2, 1620, as they had been of represent- 
ative government in Virginia by the charter of 
November 13, 16 18. When the Pilgrims found 
themselves, upon landing, too far north to use their 
" large patent " from the Virginia Company, they 
organized a government on the lines laid down in 
the general order of the company. The govern- 
ment established by them in their famous Com- 
pact was precisely the provisional government 
which the Virginia Company in the preceding 
February had given them liberty to found " till a 
form of government be here settled for them." 
Under this compact they proceeded to confirm 
the election of the governor, already chosen under 



Chap. III. 



Authors of 
the Plym- 
outh 
Govern- 
ment. 



Note 4. 



1/4 



T]ie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Charges 

against 

Sandys. 



Duke of 
Manches- 
ter, papers, 
Royal 
Hist. MSS. 
Comm. 
%'iii, II, 45. 



Note 5. 



The fare- 
well to 
Europe. 



the authority derived from the charter, now in- 
valid. 

The enemies of Sir Edwin Sandys did not fail 
to make use of his friendship for the Leyden people 
to do him injury. It was afterward charged that 
he was opposed to monarchical government, and 
that he had moved the Archbishop of Canterbury 
" to give leave to the Brownists and Separatists to 
go to Virginia, and designed to make a free pop- 
ular state there, and himself and his assured friends 
were to be the leaders." That Sandys thought of 
emigration is hardly probable, but he succeeded in 
establishing two popular governments in America 
which propagated themselves beyond all that he 
could have hoped to achieve. 

VIII. 

" Small things," wrote Dudley to the Countess 
of Lincoln in the first months of the Massachusetts 
settlement — " small things in the beginning of 
natural or politic bodies are as remarkable as 
greater in bodies full grown." The obscure events 
we have recited above are capital because they had 
a deciding influence on the fate of the Pilgrim set- 
tlement. It is not within our purpose to tell over 
again the pathetic story of that brave departure of 
the younger and stronger of the Pilgrims from 
Leyden to make the first break into the wilderness, 
but courage and devotion to an idea are not com- 
mon ; courage and devotion that bring at last im- 
portant results are so rare that the student of his- 



TJie Pilzfim Mis:rations. 



175 



tory, however little disposed to indulge sentiment, 
turns in spite of himself to that last all-night meet- 
ing in Pastor Robinson's large house in the Belfry 
Lane at Leyden. " So," says Bradford, as if pen- 
ning a new holy scripture, " they lefte that goodly 
and pleasante citie, which had been ther resting 
place near 12 years; but they knew they were 
pilgrimes and looked not much on those things, but 
lift up their eyes to the heavens, their dearest cun- 
trie and quieted their spirits." Nor is it easy to 
pass over the solemn parting on the quay at Delft 
Haven, where, as the time of the tide forced the 
final tearful separation, while even the Dutch spec- 
tators wept in sympathy, the voice of the beloved 
Robinson in a final prayer was heard and the whole 
company fell upon their knees together for the last 
time. 

These things hardly pertain, perhaps, to a his- 
tory of life such as this. It is with the influences 
that are to mold the new life while it is plastic that 
we are concerned. Chief of these is Robinson him- 
self, a Moses who was never to see, even from a 
mountain top, the Canaan to which he had now led 
his people. He must stay behind wath the larger 
half of the church. Rising to the occasion, his last 
words to this little company are worthy his mag- 
nanimous soul. He eloquently charged them " be- 
fore God and his blessed angels to follow him no 
further than he followed Christ." . . . He was con- 
fident " the Lord had more truth and lifjht to break 
forth out of his holy word." In whatever sense v/e 



Chap. III. 



Plimoth 
Planta- 
tion, 59. 



Robin- 
son's influ- 
ence. 



Window's 

Briefe 

Narration, 

Young, 

397- 



176 



The Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Note 6. 



The 

.landing. 



take them these were marvelous words in the sev- 
enteenth century. Robinson understood the pro- 
gressive nature of truth as apprehended by the 
human mind in a way that makes him seem singu- 
larly modern. In the same address he declared it 
" not possible that . . . full perfection of knowl- 
edge should break forth at once." He bade them 
not to affect separation from the Puritans in the 
Church of England, but " rather to study union 
than division." 

Admirable man! Free from pettiness and ego- 
tism. Fortunate man, who, working in one of the 
obscurest and dustiest corners of this noisy and 
self-seeking world, succeeded in training and send- 
ing out a company that diffused his spirit and 
teachings into the institutions and thoughts of a 
great people ! 

IX. 

' On a chain of slender accidents hung the exist- 
ence of New England. Had the claims of Guiana 
prevailed, had the tempting offers of the Dutch 
changed the allegiance of the Robinsonian Inde- 
pendents, had the Mayflower reached her destina- 
tion in what is now New Jersey, the current of 
American history would not have flowed as it has. 
A South American New England, a Dutch New 
England, or a non-peninsular community of Eng- 
glish Puritans west of the Hudson with good 
wheat fields and no fisheries or foreign trade, would 
have been different in destiny from what we call 



The Pilgrim Migrations. 



177 



New England, and its influence on events and 
national character could not have been the same. 
It will always remain doubtful whether or not 
Jones, the captain of the Mayflower, was bribed by 
the Dutch, as the Plymouth people came to believe. 
Nothing could be more probable in view of the 
general bad character of the seamen of that time 
and the eagerness of one political party in Hol- 
land to secure a foothold for the Dutch in America ; 
but whether Jones, who seems to have borne a bad 
reputation, was bribed, or, as he pretended, became 
entangled in the shoals of Cape Cod and turned 
back in real despair of finding his way, is of no mo- 
ment. He turned back and came to anchor in 
Provincetown Harbor. Here the threats of the 
brutal seamen, unwilling to go farther, and the 
clamor of the overcrowded and sea-weary passen- 
gers did the rest. To continue longer closely 
cabined in the little ship was misery and perhaps 
death. Here was land, and that was enough. And 
so, after exploration of the whole coast of Cape 
Cod Bay, the place already named Plymouth on 
John Smith's map was selected for a settlement. 
Here the landing was made on the loth of No- 
vember, O. S., 1620. 

Camden has preserved to us an old English say- 
ing accepted in the days of the Pilgrims, to the 
effect that " a barren country is a great whet 
to the industry of a people." It was the wedding 
of an austere creed to an austere soil under an 
austere sky that gave the people of New England 
13 



Chap. III. 



Morton's 
Memorial, 
6th edition, 
p. 22, note. 



Compare 
Asher's 
History of 
W. I. 
Company 
in Bibl. 
Essay. 



Note 7. 



Note 8. ^ 



Elements 
of New 
England. 



178 



The Puritan Mis'ration. 



Earlier at- 
tempts to 
colonize 
New Eng- 
land. 



their marked character, and the severe economic 
conditions imposed by the soil and climate were 
even more potent than Puritanism in producing 
the traits that go to make up the New England of 
history. 

X. 

The unwise management that ruined nearl}^ all 
projects for colonization in that age and that pro- 
duced such disasters in Virginia, had defeated every 
earlier attempt to plant English people on the New 
England coast. Gosnold had taken a colony to Eliza- 
beth Island in Buzzard's Bay in 1602, but the men 
went back in the ship in order to share the profit 
of a cargo of sassafras. Captain George Popham 
was the head of a party that undertook to colonize 
the coast of Maine in 1607, but having suffered 
" extreme extremities " during the winter, the col- 
onists returned the following year. In 161 5 Cap- 
tain John Smith himself set out with sixteen men, 
only to be taken by a French privateer. These 
and other attempts ending in failure, and many dis- 
astrous trading voyages, led to a belief that the 
Indian conjurers, who were known to be the devil's 
own, had laid a spell on the northern coast to keep 
the white people away. This enchanted land 
might long have lain waste if Captain Jones of the 
Mayflower, sailing to Hudson River or the region 
south of it, had not run foul of the shoals of Cape 
Cod. 



The Pilzrim Migrations. 



179 



XI. 

The Pilgrims suffered, like their predecessors, 
from the prevailing unskillfulness in colony-plant- 
ing. They had escaped from the horrors of the 
Mayflower, but how much better was the wild land 
than the wild sea ; the rude, overcrowded forest 
cabins than the too populous ship? " All things 
stared upon them with a weather-beaten face," says 
Bradford. The horrors of the first winter in Vir- 
ginia were repeated ; here, as at Jamestown, nearly 
all were ill at once, and nearly half of the people 
died before the coming of spring. The same sys- 
tem of partnership with mercenary shareholders or 
"adventurers" in England that had brought dis- 
aster in Virginia was tried with similar results at 
Plymouth, and a similar attempt at communism in 
labor and supply was made, this time under the 
most favorable conditions, among a people consci- 
entious and bound together by strong religious 
enthusiasm. It resulted, as such sinking of per- 
sonal interest must ever result, in dissensions and 
insubordination, in unthrift and famine. 

The colony was saved from the prolonged mis- 
ery that makes the early history of Virginia hor- 
rible by the wise head and strong hand of its leader. 
William Bradford, who had been chosen governor 
on the death of Carver, a few months after the 
arrival at Plymouth, had been a youth but eight- 
een years old when he fled with the rest of the 
Scrooby church to Holland. He was bred to hus- 



Chap. III. 



Sufferings 
at Plym- 
outh. 



Bradford. 



i8o 



T]ie Puritan Mis^ration. 



Book II. 



Abolition 
of com- 
munism. 



bandry and had inherited some propert3\ In Hol- 
land he became a silk worker and on attaining his 
majority set up for himself in that trade. He was 
still a young man when first chosen governor of 
the little colony, and he ruled New Plymouth al- 
most continuously till his death — that is, for about 
thirty-seven years. He was of a magnanimous 
temper, resolute but patient, devotedly religious, 
but neither intolerant nor austere. He had a 
genius for quaintly vivid expression in writing that 
marked him as a man endowed with the literary 
gift, which comes as Heaven pleases where one 
would least look for it. 

XII. 

After two years of labor in common had 
brought the colony more than once to the verge 
of ruin, Bradford had the courage and wisdom 
to cut the knot he could not untie. Durinsf the 
scarce springtime of 1623, he assigned all the de- 
tached persons in the colony to live with fam- 
ilies, and then temporarily divided the ancient 
Indian field on which the settlement had been 
made among the several families in proportion to 
their number, leaving every household to shift for 
itself or suffer want. "Any general want or suffer- 
ing hath not been among them since to this day," 
he writes years afterward. The assignment was a 
revolutionary stroke, in violation of the contract 
with the shareholders, and contrary to their wishes. 
But Bradford saw that it was a life-and-death ne- 



TJie Pilorim Migrations. 



i8i 



cessity to be rid of the pernicious system, even at 
the cost of cutting off all support from England. 
In his history he draws a very clear picture of the 
evils of communism as he had observed them. 

XIII. 

Why should the historian linger thus over the 
story of this last surviving remnant of the 
" Brownists " ? Why have we dwelt upon the little 
settlement that was never very flourishing, that 
consisted at its best of only a few thousand peace- 
ful and agricultural people, and that after seventy 
years was merged politically in its more vigorous 
neighbor the colony of Massachusetts Bay? His- 
torical importance does not depend on population, 
Plymouth was the second step in the founding of a 
great nation. When Bradford and the other lead- 
ers had at last successfully extricated the little set- 
tlement from its economical difficulties, it became 
the sure forerunner of a greater Puritan migration. 
This tiny free state on the margin of a wilderness 
continent, like a distant glimmering pharos, showed 
the persecuted Puritans in England the fare-way to 
a harbor. 



Elucidations. 

Sir John Harington says : " The bishops came to the Kynge 
aboute the petition of the puritans ; I was by, and heard much 
dyscourse. The Kynge talked muche Latin, and disputed wyth 
Dr. Reynoldes, at Hampton, but he rather usede upbraidinges than 
argumente ; and tolde the petitioners that they wanted to strip 



Chap. III. 



Note 9. 



Signifi- 
cance of 
Plymouth. 



Note I, 
page 162 



182 



The Puritan Alteration. 



Book II. 



<^ 






.V, 



Note 2, 
page 1 53. 



Christe againe, and bid them awaie with their snivellinge : more- 
over, he wishede those who woud take away the surplice mighte 
want linen for their own breech. The bishops seemed much 
pleased and said his Majestie spoke by the power of inspiration. 
I wist not what they mean ; but the spirit was rather foule 
mouthede." Nugas Antiquae, i, i8i, 182. James took pains to 
put an example of his bad taste on paper. In a letter on the sub- 
ject he brags in these words : " We haue kept suche a reuell with 
the Puritainis heir these two dayes as was neuer harde the lyke, 
quhaire I haue pepperid thaime as soundlie as ye haue done the 
papists thaire. ... I was forcid at the last to saye unto thaime, 
that if any of thaim hadde bene in a colledge disputing with their 
skollairs, if any of their disciples had ansoured thaim in that sorte 
they wolde haue fetched him up in place of a replye, and so 
shoulde the rodde haue plyed upon the poore boyes buttokis." 
Ellis Letters, Third Series, iv, 162. The principal authorities on 
the Hampton Court Conference are, first, " The Svmme and Svb- 
stance of the Conference, which it pleased his excellent Majestie 
to have," etc., " Contracted by William Barlow, . . . Deane of 
Chester"; second. Dr. Montague's letter to his mother, in Win- 
wood's Memorials, ii, 13-15 ; third, the letter of Patrick Galloway 
to the Presbytery of Edinburgh, in Calderwood, vi, 241, 242 ; and, 
fourth, a letter from Tobie Mathew, Bishop of Durham, to Hut- 
ton, Archbishop of York, in Strype's Whitgift appendix, xlv. 
Compare Nugse Antiquas, 181, 182, and the king's letter to 
Blake, in Ellis's Letters, third series, iv, 161, which are both cited 
above. Mr. Gardiner has shown (History of England, i, 1 59) 
that this letter is addressed to Northampton. There are several 
documents relating to the conference among the state papers 
calendared by Mrs. Greene under dates in January, 1604. Of 
the vigorous action taken against the Puritans after the confer- 
ence, some notion may be formed by the letter of protest from the 
aged Matthew Hutton, Archbishop of York, to Lord Cranborne, 
in Lodge's Illustrations of British History, iii, 115, and Cran- 
borne's reply, ibid., 125. 

Stith has not the weight of an original authority, but he is 
justly famous for accuracy in following his authorities, and he 
had access to many papers relating to the history of Virginia 
which are now lost. Under the year 1608 he says: "Doctor 
Whitgift, Arch-Bishop of Canterbur}', . . . having died four 
Years before this, was succeeded to that high Preferment by Dr, 



The Pilgrim Migrations. 



183 



Richard Bancroft. ... He had very high Notions with Relation 
to the Government of both Church and State ; and was accord- 
ingly a great Stickler for, and Promoter of, the King's absolute 
Power, and failed not to take all Occasions, to oblige the Puritans 
to conform to the Church of England. This Prelate's Harshness 
and Warmth caused many of that People to take the Resolution 
this Year of settling themselves in Virginia, and some were actu- 
ally come off for that Purpose. But the Arch-bishop, finding 
that they were preparing in great Numbers to depart, obtained a 
Proclamation from the King, forbidding any to go, without his 
Majesty's express Leave." History of Virginia, 1747, p. 76. 

For Whitaker's filiation, Neill's Virginia Company, 78. Whit- 
aker's Good Newes from Virginia is no doubt intended by the 
entry in the inventory of Brewster's goods, " Newes from Vir- 
ginia." I know no other book with such a title. That Alexander 
Whitaker was himself touched with Puritanism, or at least was 
not unwilling to have Puritan ministers for colleagues, is rendered 
pretty certain from passages in his letters. For instance, he 
writes to Crashaw from Jamestown, August 9, 161 1, desiring that 
young and "godly" ministers should come, and adds, "We have 
noe need either of ceremonies or bad livers." British Museum, 
Additional MSS., 21,993. (The letter is printed in Browne's Gen- 
esis, 499, 500.) In a letter given in Purchas and in Neill, 95, 
dated June 18, 1614, he says that neither subscription nor the 
surplice are spoken of in Virginia. It has escaped the notice of 
church historians that Whitaker's semi-Puritanism seems to have 
left traces for many j^ears on the character and usage of the 
Virginia church. The Rev. Hugh Jones writes as late as 1724 
in his Present State of Virginia, p. 68, that surplices were only 
then "beginning to be brought in Fashion," and that the people 
in some parishes received the Lord's Supper sitting. 

The late Dr. Neill was the first, I believe, to call attention to 
this fact, though he did not state it quite so strongly as I have 
put it in the text. It is worth while transferring Neill's remarks 
from the New England Genealogical Register, vol. xxx, 412, 413 : 
" The action of the passengers of the Mayflower in forming a 
social compact before landing at Plymouth Rock seems to have 
been in strict accordance with the policy of the London Com- 
pany, under whose patent the ship sailed. On June 9, 1619, O. S., 
John Whincop's patent was duly sealed by the Company, but this 
which had cost the Puritans so much labor and money was not 



Chap. III. 



Note 3, 
page 168. 



O^ 



Note 4, 
page 173. 



1 84 



The Puritan Mi(rration. 



Book II. 



Note 5, , 
page 174.' 



used. Several months after, the Leyden people became inter- 
ested in a new project. On February 2, i6i9-'20, at a meeting at 
the house of Sir Edwin Sandys in Aldersgate, he stated to the 
Company that a grant had been made to John Peirce and his as- 
sociates. At the same quarterly meeting it was expressly ordered 
that the leaders of particular plantations, associating unto them 
divers of the gravest and discreetest of their companies, shall have 
liberty to make orders, ordinances, and constitutions for the better 
ordering and directing of their business and servants, provided 
they be not repugnant to the laws of England." Bradford, in his 
Plimouth Plantation, 90, says they " chose or rather confirmed 
Mr. John Carver, . . . their Governour for that year " — that is, for 
1620. Mr. Deane, the editor of Bradford, has lost the force of 
this by misunderstanding a statement in Mourt's Relation, so 
called. See Deane's note, page 99, of Bradford. The statement 
in Mourt is under date of March 23d. I quote from the reprint in 
Young, 196, 197 : "and did likewise choose our governor for this 
present year, which was Master John Carver," etc. Young ap- 
plies Bradford's words, "or rather confirmed," to this event, and 
Deane also supposes that Bradford confuses two elections. Car- 
ver was no doubt chosen in England or Holland under authority 
of the charter to serve for the calendar year, and confirmed or 
rechosen after the Compact was signed. What took place on the 
23d of March was that a governor was elected for the year 1621, 
wliich, according to the calendar of that time, began on the 25th 
of March. For the next year they chose Carver, who was already 
"governor for this present year," and whose first term was about 
to expire. Both Deane and Young failed to perceive the preg- 
nant fact that Carver was governor during the voyage, and so lost 
the force of the words "or rather confirmed." Bradford, in that 
portion of his History of Plimouth Plantation which relates to this 
period, gives several letters illustrating the negotiations of the 
Pilgrims with the Virginia Company. The MS. Records of the 
Company in the Library of Congress, under dates of May 26 and 
June 9, 1619, and February 19, 1620 (1619 O. S.), contain the 
transactions relating to the Whincop Charter, which was not 
used, on account of Whincop's death, and the Pierce Charter, 
which the Pilgrims took with them. 

The charge against Sandys is in the Duke of Manchester's 
papers, Royal Historical MS. Commission viii, H, 45. It is re- 
markable that the dominant liberal faction in the Virginia Com- 



TJie Pilgrim Migrations. 



185 



pany is here accused of seeking to do what the Massachusetts 
Company afterward did^to wit, to found a popular American 
government by virtue of powers conferred in a charter. That 
liberal government in New England had its rise in the arrange- 
ments made with the London or Virginia Company before 
sailing, and not, as poets, painters, and orators have it, in the 
cabin of the Mayflower, is sufficiently attested in a bit of evi- 
dence, conspicuous enough, but usually overlooked. Robinson's 
farewell letter to the whole company, which reached them in 
England, is in Bradford, 64-67, and in Mourt's Relation. It has 
several significant allusions to the form of government already 
planned. " And lastly, your intended course of civill communi- 
tie will minister continuall occasion of offence." The allusion 
here seems to be to the joint- stock and communistic system of 
labor and living proposed. In another paragraph the allusion 
is to the system of government : " Whereas, you are become a 
body politik, using amongst your selves civill governmente, and 
are not furnished with any persons of spetiall emencie above the 
rest, to be chosen by you into office of governmente," etc., 
" you are at present to have only them for your ordinarie gov- 
ernours, which your selves shall make choyse of for that worke." 
That the government under the Virginia Company w^as to be 
democratic is manifest. The compact was a means of giving it 
the sanction of consent w^here the patent and the general order 
did not avail for that purpose. 

Winslow's Briefe Narration appended to his Hypocrisie 
Vnmasked is the only authority for Robinson's address. Dr. 
H. M. Dexter has with characteristic wealth of learning and in- 
genuity sought to diminish the force of these generous words of 
Robinson in his Congregationalism, 403 and ff. But the note 
struck in this farewell address was familiar to the later followers 
of Robinson's form of Independency. Five of the ministers who 
went to Holland in 1637 and founded churches, published in 1643 
a tract called An Apologeticall Narrative Humbly Submitted to 
the Honourable Houses of Parliament. By Thomas Goodwin, 
Phillip Nye, Sidrach Simpson, Jer. Borroughs, William Bridge. 
London, 1643. From the copy in the British Museum I quote: 
" A second principle we carryed along with us in all our resolu- 
tions was. Not to make our present judgment and practice a 
binding law unto ourselves for the future which we in like man- 
ner made continuall profession of upon all occasions." On page 



Chap. III. 



Note 6, X 
page 176. 



i86 



The Puritan Mio;ration. 



Book II. 



4 



Note 7, 
page 177. 



Note 8, 
page 177. 



Note 9, 
page iSi. 



22 Robinson's words are almost repeated in the phrase "they 
coming new out of popery . . . might not be perfect the first 
day." Robinson's early colleague, Smyth, the unpractical, much- 
defamed, but saintly "Anabaptist," says in a tract published 
after his death, " I continually search after the truth." Robinson 
wrote a reply to a portion of this tract. See Barclay's Inner 
Life, appendix to Chapter V, where the tract is given. This 
holding of their opinions in a state of flux, this Hberal expectancy 
of a further evolution of opinion, was a trait to be admired in the 
early Separatists in an nge when modesty in dogmatic statement 
was exceedingly rare. 

Neill, in the Historical Magazine for January, i869rand the 
New England Genealogical Register, 1874, identifies the May- 
flower captain with Jones of the Discovery, who was accounted 
in Virginia " dishonest." But honest seamen were few in that 
half-piratical age. That he was hired by the Dutch to take the 
Pilgrims elsewhere than to Hudson River is charged in Morton's 
Memorial, and is not in itself unlikely. But the embarrassments 
of Cape Cod shoals were very real ; a trading ship sent out by 
the Pilgrims after their settlement, failed to find a way round 
the cape. 

Early New England writers were not content with giving the 
Pilgrims the honor due to them, Hutchinson asserts that the 
Virginia Colony had virtually failed, and that the Pilgrim settle- 
ment was the means of reviving it. This has been often repeated 
on no other authority than that of Hutchinson, who wrote nearly 
a century and a half after the event. The list of patents for 
plantations in Virginia as given by Purchas, in which appears 
that of Master " Wincop," under which the Pilgrims proposed to 
plant, is a sufficient proof that Virginia was not languishing. 
" These patentees," says Purchas, " have undertaken to transport 
to Virginia a great multitude of people and store of cattle." 
Virginia had reached the greatest prosperity it attained before 
the dissolution of the company, in precisely the years in which 
the slender Pilgrim Colony was preparing. It is quite possible 
to honor the Pilgrims without reversing the order of cause and 
effect. 

': Bradford's Plimouth Plantation, 135, 136: "The experience 
that was had in this commone course and condition, tried sun- 
drie years, and that amongst godly and sober men, may well 



The Pilgrim Migrations. 



evince the vanitie of that conceite of Platos and other ancients 
ap^auded by son.e of later ti.es-that the taking away of prop: 
mak; them r'""^ " comn^unitie into a comone wealth, woufd 
make them happy and florishing ; as if they were wiser than 
God^ For th,scommunitie (so fare as it was) was found to breed 
much confusion and discontent, and retard much imployment 
that would have been to their benefite and comforte Forthe 
yong-men that were most able and fitte for labour and ;erv^ce ^ 
repme that they should spend their time and streing'h o ^te 
fo other mens w.ves and children with out any recompence 
The strong, or man of parts, had no more in devission of ictails 
and c oaths, then he that was weake and not able to doe an an 
the other could; this was thought injuestice. The a.ed and 

d^thsr'" rr'^' ^"' ^^-^'^^^^ ^^ labour. and^^Lis 
cloaths, &c., with the meaner and yonsjer sorte thnnc^Kt v 

indigniteand disrespect unto them And Tor' ^ '"""^ 

commanded to doe servise for other' n. . ^''"'' '° ^' 

washing their cloaths ^c-l^^erd U aT"? ^'r',"^"^' 
neither could many husbands well brooTe i TI .k ""' 
being to have alike and all to doe a^ke h J f^ u u" ^^'^^ '" 
.n the like condition, and one ^;::^::tZ:^^^;^ 
no cut of those relations that God hath set amo gest men vef ^ 
d d much d:mmish and take of the mutuall respecl thTt sho Id 

thevT; K ""'^-^'^ ^'^"- ^"^ ^-"'^ have bene vorse if 
they had been men of another condition." 



18; 



Chap. III. 



CHAPTER THE FOURTH. 
THE GREAT PURITAN EXODUS. 



Book II. 

Result of 
the Pil- 
grim set- 
tlement. 



I. 

Men who undertake a great enterprise rarely 
find their anticipations fulfilled ; they are fortunate 
if their general aim is reached at last in any way. 
The Pilgrims had migrated, hoping to be "step- 
ping-stones to others," as they phrased it. They 
thought that many like-minded in matters of re- 
ligion would come to them out of England, but 
the Separatist movement had been worn out by 
persecution. There were few open dissenters left, 
and the Pilgrims, by their long exile, had lost all 
close relations with their own country. Among 
those that came to Plj'mouth from England were 
some whose coming tended to dilute the religious 
life and lower the moral standards of the colony. 
The fervor of the Pilgrims themselves abated 
something of its intensity in the preoccupations 
incident to pioneer life. The hope of expanding 
their religious organization by the rapid growth of 
the colony was not fulfilled ; discontented Puri- 
tans were not eager to settle under the government 
of Separatists, and ten years after their migration 
the Plymouth colony contained little more than 
three hundred people. 



The Great Puritan Exodus. 



189 



None the less the hope of the Pilgrims was real- 
ized ; they became stepping-stones to thousands of 
others. Captain John Smith laughed at the ''hu- 
morous ignorances " of these " Brownist " settlers, 
but, humorous or not, ignorant or not, the " Brown- 
ists " remained on the coast while other emigrants 
retreated. In spite of their terrible suffering none 
of the Pilgrims went back. This is the capital fact 
in their history. A new force had been introduced 
into colonization. Henceforth persecuted or dis- 
contented religionists, prompted by a motive vastly 
more strenuous and enduring than cupidity, were 
to bear the main brunt of breaking a way into the 
wilderness. 

The first effect of the slender success at Plym- 
outh was to stimulate speculative and merely ad- 
venturous migration. From 1607 until the arrival 
of the Pilgrims in 1620 no English colony had 
landed on the northern coast; but after the Pil- 
grims came, fish-drying and fur-buying stations be- 
gan to appear on the banks of the Piscataqua and 
the coast eastward in 1622 and 1623. These tiny 
settlements were germs of New Hampshire and 
Maine, the only New England plantations begun 
without any admixture of religious motives. A 
commercial colony was tried in Massachusetts Bay 
as early as 1622, but it failed. There were other 
like attempts. In 1624 some men of Dorchester, 
headed by John White, the " Patriarch " Puritan 
clergyman, sent out a colony to Cape Ann. The 
members of this company were to grow maize to 



Chap. IV, 

The 

religious 

motive. 



Commer- 
cial settle- 
ments. 



1 90 



The Puritan JMis^ration. 



Book II, 



John 
White's 
The Plant- 
er's Plea, 
in Young's 
Chronicles 
of Mass. 



Individual 
settlers. 



supply fishing ships, and in the season the same 
men were to lend a hand on board the ships, which 
would thus be saved the necessity for carrying 
double crews. But this plausible scheme proved a 
case of seeking strawberries in the sea and red her- 
rings in the wood. Farmers were but lubbers at 
codfishing, and salt-water fishermen were clumsy 
enough in the cornfield. Losses of several sorts 
forced the Dorchester Company to dissolve. Four 
members of their futile colony, encouraged by 
a message from White, remained on Cape Ann. 
Removing to the present site of Salem, they waited 
at the risk of their lives for the coming of a new 
colony from England. 

Solitary adventurers of the sort known on near- 
ly every frontier were presently to be found in sev- 
eral places. The scholarly recluse was represented 
by Blackstone, who had selected for his secluded 
abode a spot convenient to a spring of good water 
where the town of Boston was afterward planted ; 
the inevitable Scotch adventurer was on an island 
in Boston Harbor ; Samuel Maverick, a pattern of 
frontier hospitality and generosity, took up his 
abode on Noddle's Island ; while the rollicking and 
scoffing libertine was found in Thomas Morton, 
who with some rebellious bond servants got posses- 
sion of a fortified house in what is now Braintree. 
Here Morton welcomed renegade servants from 
Plymouth and elsewhere. He wrote ribald verses 
which he posted on his Maypole, and devised May- 
dances in which the saturnine Indian women par- 



TJie Great Puritan Exodus. 



191 



ticipated. He broke all the commandments with 
delight, carried on a profitable trade in selling fire- 
arms to the savages in defiance of royal proclama- 
tions, and wrought whatever other deviltry came 
within his reach, until his neighbors could no longer 
endure the proximity of so dangerous a firebrand. 
Little Captain Standish, whom Morton derisively 
dubbed " Captain Shrimp," descended on this king- 
dom of misrule at last and broke up the perpetual 
carnival, sending Morton to England. 

The settlement of New England was thus be- 
ginning sporadically and slowly. If the Massachu- 
setts Puritans had not come, these feeble and scat- 
tered plantations might have grown into colonies 
after a long time, as such beginnings did in New 
Hampshire and Maine, and later in North Caro- 
lina, but having no strong neighbor to support 
them, it is likely that they would all have been 
driven away or annihilated by some inevitable col- 
lision with the Indians. 

II. 

English Puritanism throughout the reign of 
James I had been the party of strict morals, of 
austere and Pharisaic scrupulosity, of rigid Sab- 
bath observance, and of Calvinistic dogmatism. 
During that reign it had passed through its last 
transformation in becoming a political party — the 
party of anti-Catholic politics at home and abroad. 
Because Parliament was on its side, the mere 
course of events had made the Puritan party favor 



Chap. IV. 



Note I. 



Puritan- 
ism at the 
accession 
of Charles 
I. 



192 



TJie Piirita)! JSIizration. 



Book II. 



Later Pu- 
ritanism 
conserva- 
tive. 



the predominance of Parliament, and this brought 
it to represent liberalism in politics. By his un- 
concealed partisanship, James had contrived to 
make the Puritans a permanent opposition sus- 
pected of disliking monarchy itself. Charles I was 
even more the antagonist of Puritanism than James. 
In one other respect the position of Puritanism 
had been gradually changed by mere parallax. In 
Elizabeth's reign it had been the party of innova- 
tion. It was no longer the party of change in re- 
ligion when Charles came to the throne. The 
adoption of the Arminian system of doctrine by 
many of the High-churchmen, and the reaction- 
ary innovations now proposed by ecclesiastics like 
Laud, had left Puritanism to stand for Protestant 
conservatism. It was immeasurably the gainer 
with the mass of slow-moving people by this 
change of relative position. The parliamentary 
struggle with James and Charles added to the 
religious Puritans a numerous body of political 
Puritans who, without much care about religion, 
were fain to ally their political discontent with the 
discontent of those who resisted ecclesiastical re- 
trogression. This compact party, powerful after 
all its defeats, was bound by its position to cher- 
ish every aspiration for the improvement of morals, 
every indignant movement for the suppression of 
abuses, and it became the ally of every popular 
resentment against royal absolutism or episcopal 
encroachment, and the advocate, almost to fanati- 
cism, of an anti-Spanish foreign policy, and a do- 



The Great Pur it art Exodus. 



193 



mestic policy in which repression and persecution 
of Roman Catholics held first place. 

III. 

But the king and the High-churchmen were 
the party in possession. Buckingham, in the first 
years of Charles, was more than ever dominant at 
court, and Buckingham's favorite, just rising above 
the horizon, w^as Dr. Laud, Bishop of St. Davids 
at the death of James, and soon afterward trans- 
lated to Bath and Wells and then to London. It 
soon came to be understood that he was only wait- 
ing for the death of his opponent. Archbishop Ab- 
bott, to take the primacy, much of the power of 
which he had already contrived to grasp. On the 
death of Buckingham, Laud succeeded him as 
chief favorite at court. The one great and real 
service which this able and indefatigable divine 
rendered the world is the last he would have 
chosen. He was the main spur to the settlement 
of Puritan colonies in New England. 

Do our best, we moderns shall hardly avoid in- 
justice in our opinion of Laud. The changes of 
time and the advance of ideas have rendered a 
sympathetic judgment of him difficult. Ecclesias- 
tic above all, he was not, like Whitgift and Ban- 
croft, a Protestant High-churchman. He sought 
to make the English church Catholic and mediae- 
val, yet he would on no account attach it to Rome. 
Like Whitgift, he made the church dependent on 

royal authority, and in this he was far removed 
14 



Chap. IV. 



Rise of 
Laud. 



Note 2. 



Character 
of Laud. 



194 



TJlc Puritan Mio-ration. 



Book II. 



from the earlier churchmen. There was nothing 
spiritual in his nature ; his personal devotion had 
neither agony nor exaltation. He had none of the 
mediaeval enthusiasm that prompted the vigils of 
his contemporar}', Nicholas Ferrar, for example, 
and elevated the master of Little Gidding to a 
saintship, amiable and touching. Notwithstanding 
the energy of Laud's devotion, his nature was as 
shallow and objective as it was sincere. It has 
been remarked that when Laud spoke of the beauty 
of holiness he meant no more than decorum in pub- 
lic worship, the beauty of a well-ordered church 
and of proper intonation and genuflexion. He 
seemed to touch a modern note when he proposed 
to suppress the futile debate between Calvinists 
and Arminians because it tended to disturb Chris- 
tian charity ; but Laud's Christian charity, like his 
holiness, was purely external ; it was merely quiet 
submission to one ritual and one form of disci- 
pline. His relentless, vindictive, and even cruel 
temper toward opponents showed him incapable 
of conceiving of charity in any spiritual sense. He 
disliked controversy because it put obstacles in 
the way of uniformity, and he had no taste for 
speculative debate because it tended to undermine 
authority. His intellect was utterly practical and 
phenomenally acute. It was incredibly energetic, 
and its energy was intensified by its narrowness. 
His attachment to the church had no relation to 
the beneficent utilities of the church. The church 
was a fetich for which he was ready to die without 



TJie Great Puritan Exodus. 



195 



a murmur. In his zeal he was reckless of personal 
danger and sometimes unmindful of the moral com- 
plexion of his actions. His egotism was so inter- 
blended with his zeal that he could not separate 
one from the other, nor can the student of his 
character. A disservice to him was an affront to 
Almighty God. The very honesty of such a man 
is pernicious ; a little duplicity might have soft- 
ened the outward manifestations of his hard nature. 
Unhappily, there was not even indolence or self- 
indulgence to moderate his all but superhuman 
activity, which pushed his domination to its pos- 
sibilities, and, with a vigilance aspiring to omnis- 
cience, penetrated to the minutest details in the ad- 
ministration of church and state. He even filed 
papers giving the elements of the debates on good 
works as an evidence of sanctification carried on 
between Hooker and Cotton in the cabin meeting- 
houses of New England. For the rest he presents 
the paradoxes one expects in so marked a charac- 
ter. While he had no taste for the credulous dog- 
matism of his time, he showed a certain relish for 
superstitions in recording dreams and omens, yet 
he had none of the timidity of superstition. He 
was, moreover, fearless in peril, and he faced un- 
popularity without flinching. Stubborn and inflex- 
ible with the clergy and the populace, obdurate 
and pitiless with those who had offended him or 
his king or his church, he was flexible and insinuat- 
ing in his relations with those in power. His un- 
worthy yielding to his early patron, the Earl of 



Chap. IV. 



196 



TJie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Letter to 
Selden in 
Chalmers, 
art. Laud. 



Political 
conditions 
promote 
emigra- 
tion. 



Gorges's 
Briefe Nar- 
ration. 



Devonshire, in a matter which concerned his eccle- 
siastical conscience, gave him a bitter and lifelong 
repentance. His complacence to Buckingham, and 
his servile devotion to Charles, seem a little des- 
picable. He was even willing at the last to make 
terms with Parliament, when it became plain that 
Parliament was the new master. Though obse- 
quious, he was the farthest possible from a coward, 
and he accepted death on the scaffold with the 
serene composure of a martyr. 

IV. 

The great migration to New England set in 
soon after the beginning of Laud's ascendency in 
the ecclesiastical government of England. It waned 
as he declined, and ceased forever with his fall. 
There is a witty justness in the phrase by which a 
colonial historian dubs Laud " the father of New 
England." Other archbishops had contented them- 
selves with crushing the Separatists, but, with char- 
acteristic boldness and logical thoroughness, Laud 
struck at the powerful Puritan party which had 
contrived for more than half a century to remain in 
the Church of England while protesting against 
the discipline and service of the church. The 
arbitrary government of the new king, the dissolu- 
tion of Parliament, and the imprisonment of liberal 
leaders cut off hope of securing church reform 
or a relaxation of oppressive laws. High-church 
pulpits resounded with arguments in favor of the 
king's absolute authority and the duty of unques- 



TJie Great Puritan Exodus. 



197 



tioning obedience, while the declared principles of 
the king- and his court left the property, liberty, 
and life of the subject exposed to the rapacity or 
the vindictiveness of those in power. In view of 
these things, some of the Puritans began to think 
the American wilderness a better place of resi- 
dence than England. 



Chap. IV. 



>, 



The state of the church was even more a reason 
for removal than the oppressions of the govern- 
ment. Persecution had failed to drive Puritan 
ministers or their followers into what they deemed 
the capital sin of schism. They hated the domina- 
tion of the bishops, communion with the ungodly, 
and the absence of a rigid discipline. But they 
had been sustained through long years of waitino- 
by the hope of delivering the church from those 
who oppressed and defiled her. They proposed, 
whenever they could gain power, to winnow the 
chaff from the wheat, and they probably destined 
the chaff to swift destruction. But the hope of 
seeing a church without spot or wrinkle, prayer 
book or bishop, died under the reactionary policy 
of Buckingham and Laud, and many came to look 
with favor on a project whose full import was only 
whispered in the ear, to found in the wilds of 
America a " particular church," as they phrased it 
— a new church with a right of priority in a new 
land and backed by the sanction of the govern- 
ment of the country. It was no modern general- 



Religious 
motives 
for Puri- 
tan emi- 
gration. 



198 



TJie Puritan JUis^y'ation. 



Book II. 



Fear of 
judg- 
ments. 



Life and 
Letters of 
Winthrop, 
i, 309. 3^3- 



ized love of liberty, civil or religious, but a 
strenuous desire to find a place where they might 
make real their ideal of church organization that 
brought the Puritans out of their comfortable nests 
in England to dwell in poor cabins in a wilderness. 
It is a motive for braving dangers by sea and land 
hard of comprehension in our Sadducean age. 

There was one other consideration still more 
difficult for men of our day to understand. Politi- 
cal and military reverses had apparently well-nigh 
wrecked Protestantism on the Continent. Many 
Protestants in the Palatinate and elsewhere were 
making peace by becoming Roman Catholics. 
"All other churches of Europe are brought to 
desolation, & our sinnes, for which the Lord be- 
ginnes allrcaddy to frowne upon us & to cutte us 
short, doe threatne evill times to be comminge 
upon us." These words are set down in the Rea- 
sons for New England as the second consideration. 
In another part of the same paper it is urged that 
the " woefuU spectacle " of the ruin of " Churches 
beyound the Seas," " may teach us more wisdome 
to avoide the Plauge when it is foreseene & not to 
tarry as they did till it overtake us." The domi- 
nance of Old Testament ideas is easily seen here. 
But this fleeing from judgments that were to fall 
not on the lives or possessions of men, but on 
the churches themselves — judgments of a spiritual 
nature, apprehended only by inference — was a re- 
finement of Hebraism never known to the He- 
brews. The delusion that Laud meant to hand 



TJie Great Puritan Exodus. 



199 



over the English church bound hand and foot to 
Rome may have made such judgments seem visi- 
bly imminent. 

VI. 

The project for a Puritan colony languished at 
first on account of the failure of the semi-Puritan, 
semi-commercial Dorchester farming and fishing 
colony on Cape Ann ; but White of Dorchester 
continued to agitate the planting of a colony. He 
had, no doubt, efficient help in the proceedings 
against the Puritan clergy. From Dorchester the 
plan was carried to London, where it soon became, 
in the phrase of that time, " vulgar," or, as we 
should say, popular. Its countenance to the world, 
and especially toward the government, was that of 
a commercial venture like the planting of Virginia, 
but in its heart it was a religious enterprise. In 
March, 1628, the Council for New England gave to 
the Massachusetts projectors a patent for lands ex- 
tending from the Merrimack to the Charles and 
three miles beyond each river. The western 
boundary of this tract was the Pacific Ocean, for 
holders of grants could afford to be generous in 
giving away the interior of an unexplored conti- 
nent about which nothing was known but that it 
abounded in savages. 

VII. 

In June a small colony was sent to Massachu- 
setts under John Endecott. The next year another] 



Chap. IV. 
Note 3. 



Rise of the 
Massachu- 
setts Com- 
pany. 



Compare 
The Plant- 
er's Plea. 



200 



TJie Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 

Leader- 
ship and 
character 
of Ende- 
cott. 

1628. 



Bentley's 
Descrip- 
tion of 
Salem. 



company of emigrants was added. Endecott, who 
was one of the patentees, loved a bold enterprise, 
and readily consented to take charge of the fore- 
runners of the colony. He lacked the moderation 
and saneness needed in a leader, and his long career 
in connection with Massachusetts was marked from 
the beginning by mistakes born of a rash temper 
and impulsive enthusiasm. Two of the gentlemen 
emigrants who had been named b}' the company in 
London as members of the local Council were not 
willing to go to the unexpected lengths Endecott 
favored in the organization of the Salem church, 
though they were probably Puritans of a moderate 
type. They held a separate service with a small 
company, using the prayer book. Endecott ap- 
pears to have made no effort at conciliation ; he 
promptly shipped John and Samuel Browne, pack 
and prayer book, back to England. This was pre- 
cisely the course that even Lord Bacon advised in 
the treatment of schismatics who should contrive 
to gain access to a colony, and there is no occasion 
for surprise that a quixotic enthusiast like Endecott 
did not hold broader views than those of a philoso- 
pher of the same period. But Endecott's rash 
action endangered the whole enterprise, which re- 
quired at this stage the extreme of prudence. The 
alarmed managers in England contrived to settle 
with the Brownes in private, and the affair had no 
other result than to ruin Endecott's reputation for 
prudence. Endecott, however, went on fighting 
the Lord's battles against the Apollyons of his 



The Great Puritan Exodus. 



201 



fancy, regardless of results. Soon after his arrival 
he marched to the den of Morton, the profligate 
master of " Merrymount." In the absence of Mor- 
ton he hewed down the profane Maypole in God's 
name, and solemnly dubbed the place Mount Da- 
gon, in memory of the Philistine idol that fell down 
before the ark of the Lord. At a later period he 
cut one arm of the cross out of the English colors 
of the Salem trainband, in order to convert the 
Union Jack to Protestantism. One of the many 
manifestations of his pragmatical conscience was 
his Tartufifian protection of modesty by insisting 
that the women of Salem should keep their faces 
veiled at church. He was also a leader in the cru- 
sade of the magistrates against the crime of wear- 
ing wigs. A strange mixture of rashness, pious 
zeal, genial manners, hot temper, and harsh big- 
otr}', his extravagances supply the condiment of 
humor to a very serious history — it is perhaps the 
principal debt posterity owes him. But there was 
a side to his career too serious to be humorous. 
Bold against Maypoles and prayer books and 
women who presented themselves in church im- 
modestly barefaced, and in the forefront against 
wigs, he was no soldier either in prudent conduct 
or vigor of attack. When intrusted with the com- 
mand of an expedition to demand satisfaction of 
the Pequots, he proved incapable of anything but a 
campaign of exasperation. When late in life he 
was governor of Massachusetts, and had become, 
after the death of Winthrop and Dudley, the domi- 



Chap. IV. 



Eliot's 

Biography, 

195- 



202 



TJie Piiritaji Mizration. 



Book II. 



Leader- 
ship of 
Winthrop. 



nant political leader, the putting- to death of 
Quakers left an ineffaceable blot on the history 
of the colony he had helped to found. When 
the colony was brought to book in England for 
this severity, Endecott showed himself capable of 
writing one of the most cringing official letters on 
record, as full of cant as it was of creeping ser- 
vility. In him we may clearly apprehend certain 
unamiable traits of Puritanism and of the early 
seventeenth century which appear in his character 
in exaggerated relief. This hearty and energetic 
bigot must have been representative of a large, 
though not of the better, element in Massachusetts 
Puritanism, for he was chosen to the governorship 
oftener than any other man during the continuance 
of the old charter government. 

VIII. 

It is a pleasure to turn from Endecott to one 
who was, like him, a seventeenth-century man, and 
who did not escape the scrupulosity and ridicu- 
losity of Puritanism, but whose amiable person- 
alit}', magnanimity, and qualities of leadership 
made him the principal figure in the Puritan mi- 
gration. Winthrop, like two or three of the con- 
spicuous actors in our later history, owes his 
distinction to the moral elevation of his character 
quite as much as to his considerable mental gifts ; 
for character multiplied into sagacity is better 
than genius for some kinds of work. 

He was a late comer in the enterprise. In the 



The Great Puritan Exodus. 



203 



year after Endecott had brought over a colony 
composed mostly of servants of the company and 
of the individual patentees, a second company of 
emigrants had been sqnt over with a commission 
to Endecott as governor on the place, assisted by 
a council. A church had been formed at Salem. 
Now set in a larger agitation in favor of migration 
to New England. The course of events in Eng- 
land was so adverse to Puritanism that those who 
were devoted to that purified church, which was 
as yet invisible, except to the eye of faith, began 
to look toward America. Every door for public 
action in state or church was closed to the Puri- 
tans in England, closed and barred by Courts of 
High Commission, by the Star Chamber, and by 
the Tower. Into one of the gloomiest rooms of 
the latter had lately gone, at the arbitrary com- 
mand of the king, that high-spirited martyr to con- 
stitutional liberty. Sir John Eliot. Finding no way 
by which to come out again except a postern of 
dishonor, Eliot deliberately chose to languish and 
die in prison. The almost hopeless outlook at 
home, the example set by Endecott's emigration to 
New England in 1628, and by that of Higginson's 
company in 1629, perhaps also the ever-active 
propagandism of " Father White " of Dorchester, 
set agoing among the Puritans a widespread in- 
terest in the subject. Some of the leading minds 
thought it a noble work to organize a reformed 
church in a new country, since, in their view, the 
Church of England, under Laud, had taken up its 



Chap. IV. 

Rise of the 
great mi- 
gration of 
1630. 



204 



The Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Note 4. 



Win- 

throp's 

paper. 



His char- 
acter. 



Note 5. 



march backward. This purpose of planting a 
Puritan church in America now began to take the 
first place ; even the conversion of the Indians, 
which had been the chief avowed purpose hitherto, 
fell into the background. 

The manuscript paper entitled Reasons for 
New England, to which reference has already been 
made, was widely but secretly circulated, and fre- 
quently copied, after a fashion of that time, pre- 
vailing especially in the case of tracts or books of 
a kind to shrink from print. It contained argu- 
ments in favor of removing to New England, with 
answers to the various objections made against 
emigration. Several copies of these Reasons, or 
Considerations, have come down to us in vari- 
ous handwritings, and the authorship has been 
attributed now to one, now to another ; to Win- 
throp, to White of Dorchester, to Sir John Eliot 
himself. It appears to have been in its earliest form 
the production of Winthrop. There were horse- 
back journeys, some of them by night, made about 
this time for the purpose of secret consultation. 

Winthrop, a country gentleman of Groton, in 
Suffolk, and an attorney in the Court of Wards, 
was a strict Puritan, desiring above all a reformed 
church and " the ordinances of God in their 
purity," as the phrase of the time went. Pre- 
cocious in everything, and inclined to ideal aims, 
he had been religious from boyhood, had married 
at a little over seventeen years of age, and had 
been made a justice of the peace v/hile still very 



The Great Puritan Exodus. 



205 



young. He studied divinity, and only the dis- 
suasion of friends kept him from entering the 
ministry. Of judicial temper, he came to be often 
consulted upon points of conscience, which gave 
much trouble in that age of casuistry and abound- 
ing scruples. His kindly visits to those who were 
in any trouble of spirit were highly prized. He 
himself makes much of the corruptions of his own 
nature and of his juvenile aberrancy, but gener- 
osity and purity of spirit like his are born and 
not acquired. His devoutness, accompanied by a 
habit of self-criticism in the presence of Infinite 
Justice, doubtless gave additional vigor to his 
virtues. For the rest, he was a man of independent 
estate, of prudent and conciliatory carriage, of a 
clear but not broad mind. What, as much as any- 
thing else, fitted him for his function was that all 
his virtues were cast in Puritan molds and all his 
prejudices had a Puritan set. 

When the question of emigration was under dis- 
cussion other gentlemen who thought of going 
turned to Winthrop as the natural leader, declaring 
that they Vv'ould remain in England if he should 
desert them. He was not only the official head, 
but he was indeed the soul, of the migration of 
1630, and he went to America confident of a call 
divine like that of Moses. 

IX. 

It is a fact worthy of note that the three primary 
steps toward the establishment of free government 



Chap. IV. 



His influ- 
ence. 



Note 6. 



Cradoclf. 



206 



TJie Piirittm Mh-ration. 



Book II, 



Cradock's 
plan. 



Mass. Rec- 
ords, July 
29, 1629. 



in America were due to Englishmen who did not 
themselves cross the sea. The Great Charter of 
1618 to the Virginia colony, and the " large patent" 
to the Plymouth Pilgrims, were granted, as we 
have seen, under the leadership of Sir Edwin 
Sandys, Governor of the Virginia Company of 
London. The third of the measures which placed 
colonial government on a popular basis was due to 
the governor of another corporation engaged in 
colony planting. 

On the 28th of July, 1629, while Winthrop and 
his friends were debatinsf their removal to New 
England, Mathew Cradock, a wealthy and liberal 
merchant, who held the office of governor, or, as 
we should say, president, of the Massachusetts 
Compan}'', read in a " general court " or meeting of 
the company "certain propositions conceived by 
himself," as it is carefully recorded. He proposed 
" that for the advancement of the plantation, the 
inducing and encouraging persons of worth, qual- 
ity and rank to transplant themselves and families 
thither and for other weighty reasons " — reasons 
which probably it was not thought best to spread 
upon the records, but which were the core of the 
whole matter — for these reasons Cradock proposed 
to " transfer the government of the plantation to 
those that shall inhabit there," and not to continue 
it in subordination to a commercial company in 
London. The sorrows of the Virginia colony 
under the administration of Sir Thomas Smyth 
and the disag-reements between the Pilgrims and 



The Great Puritan Exodus. 



207 



their "adventurers" in London had taught a 
wholesome lesson. Three years earlier Sir Francis 
VVyatt, the best of all the early governors of Vir- 
ginia, had set forth in an elaborate report that the 
principal cause of the " slow proceeding of the 
growth of the plantation " was that the govern- 
ment had been divided between England and Vir- 
ginia. Massachusetts escaped from this embar- 
rassment. 

X. 

The evolution of the Massachusetts government 
may now be traced through its several stages. A 
company was formed, partly of Dorchester men, 
but chiefly of residents of London. This company 
secured a patent to lands in Massachusetts Bay 
from the Council for New England. The patentees 
intended both a commercial enterprise and a Puri- 
tan settlement. They sent Endecott, one of their 
number, as agent or superintendent, with a com- 
pany of servants and others, to prepare the way for 
the migration of other patentees. In March, 1628, 
they secured a liberal charter from the king, which 
gave them the right to establish in Massachusetts 
a government subordinate to the company. The 
plan was to settle a government in the form ren- 
dered familiar by that of the Virginia Company. 
The Massachusetts Company in London sent a 
commission to Endecott as governor on the place, 
subject to the orders of the company in England. 
A council of assistants was associated with him, 



Chap. IV. 

Sainsbury's 
Calendar, 
May 17, 
1626. 



Evolution 
of the 
Mass. gov- 
ernment. 



Hubbard, 
chap, xviii. 



208 



The Puritan Misrratioji. 



Book II. 

Note 7. 

The 

change of 
plan. 



but there was as yet no provision for giving the 
people a voice in the government. 

Winthrop and his coterie of gentlemen appear 
to have been dissatisfied with the prospect of liv- 
ing under a government directed from England, 
and thus subject to English stockholders and liable 
to interference from the court. Cradock had been 
a leader and the most liberal investor in the enter- 
prise. He, no doubt, readily foresaw the great ad- 
vance that the colony would make if Winthrop and 
his friends should embark their lives and fortunes 
in it, and he may have intended to emigrate him- 
self. The annulling of the charter of the Virginia 
Company on frivolous pretexts had shown how 
easily the Massachusetts charter might meet the 
same fate in a reign far more devoted to arbitrary 
government than that of James and entirely hostile 
to Puritanism. There could hardly be a doubt 
that the charter would be revoked as soon as its 
projectors should develop their true purpose be- 
fore the all-observing eyes of Laud, who was now 
rising rapidly to dominant influence in the govern- 
ment. It was at this juncture probably that Cra- 
dock conceived his ingenious plan. He would re- 
sign his place and have the officers of the company 
chosen from gentlemen about to embark for the 
plantation. The charter prescribed no place of 
assembling to the company, which had been left 
free apparently to make its headquarters at its 
birthplace in Dorchester or at its new home in 
London. It was also free to meet in any other 



TJie Great Puritan Exodus. 



209 



place. The meetings of the company might there- 
fore be held in Massachusetts, where the Puritan- 
ism of its proceedings would attract less attention. 
The governor and other officers would then be 
chosen in the colony ; the company and the colony 
would thus be merged into one, and the charter 
transported to Massachusetts would perhaps be 
beyond the reach of writs and judgments. 

XI. 

No doubt the influential company of friends 
who were debating a removal to New England 
were informed of Cradock's proposition before it 
was mooted in the company on the 28th of July. 
The plan was probably thought of in consequence 
of their objection to emigration under the Virginia 
system. Cradock's proposition was at least the 
turning point of their decision. Nearly a month 
later, on the 26th of August, the leaders of Win- 
throp's party assembled to the number of twelve, 
at Cambridge, and solemnly pledged themselves, 
"in the presence of God who is the searcher of all 
hearts," "to pass the Seas (under God's protection) 
to inhabit and continue in New England." The 
preamble states the object of this migration. It 
was not civil liberty, the end that political Puri- 
tans had most in view, and certainly there is no 
hint of a desire for religious liberty. Even the 
conversion of the Indian is not uppermost in this 
solemn resolve. " God's glory and the church's 
good " are the words used. This has the true ring 
15 



Chap. IV. 



The Cam- 
bridge 
agree- 
ment. 



1629. 



210 



The Puritan Migration. 



Book II. 



Removal 
of the 
charter. 

1629. 



Note 8. 



of the Puritan churchman. The whole pledge is 
couched in language befitting men who feel them- 
selves engaged in a religious enterprise of the 
highest importance. 

This pledge contained a notable proviso. The 
signers agreed to emigrate only on condition that 
" the whole government together with the patent 
for said plantation " should be transferred and 
legally established in the colony by order of the 
General Court of the Company, and that this 
should be done before the last of the ensuing 
month. There was opposition to the removal of 
the government, and this peremptory condition 
was necessary. Three days later, after a debate, 
the company voted that its government should be 
transferred to Massachusetts Bay. 

On the 20th of October Cradock resigned his 
governorship and Winthrop was chosen in his 
stead. Puritan ministers were at once elected to 
the freedom of the company, in order that its pro- 
ceedings might not want the sanction of pra3'er. 
The next year the charter crossed the wide seas, 
and in 1630 a court of the company was held in 
the wilderness at Charlestown. But a subordinate 
government " for financial affairs only " was main- 
tained in London, with Cradock, the former presi- 
dent, at the head. This seems to have been an 
effectual blind, and probably the king's govern- 
ment did not know of the flight of the charter 
until the Privy Council in 1634 summoned Cra- 
dock to brina: that document to the Council Board. 



The Great Puritan Exodus. 



211 



Thomas Morton, the expelled master of Merry- 
mount, writes of the wrath of Laud, who had been 
foiled by this pretty ruse : " My lord of Canter- 
bury and my lord privy seal, having- caused all Mr. 
Cradock's letters to be viewed and his apology for 
the brethren particularly heard, protested against 
him and Mr. Humfries that they were a couple of 
imposturous knaves." Laud had thought to crush 
the government of Massachusetts by destroying 
the company, whose office remained in London, 
with Cradock still apparently its head. The arch- 
bishop found too late that he had eagerly pounced 
upon a dummy. He devised many things after- 
ward to achieve his purpose, but the charter re- 
mained over seas. 

XII. 

From the point of view of our later age, the re- 
moval of the charter government to America is the 
event of chief importance in this migration of 
Winthrop's company. The ultimate effect of this 
brilliant stroke was so to modify a commercial cor- 
poration that it became a colonial government as 
independent as possible of control from England. 
By the admission of a large number of the colo- 
nists to be freemen — that is, to vote as stock- 
holders in the affairs of the company, which was 
now the colony itself, and a little later by the de- 
velopment of a second chamber — the government 
became representative. 

But we may not for a moment conceive that 



Chap. IV. 

Compare 
Palfrey, i, 
371, and 
Deane's 
note in 
Mass. Hist. 
Soc. Proc. 
1869, p. 
185. 



Hutchin- 
son's Hist. 
Mass., p. 
31- 



212 



TJie Puritan JMis^ratioji. 



Book II. 



The main 
purpose. 



Influence 
of Plym- 
outh. 



the colonists understood the importance of their 
act in the light of its consequences. In their 
minds the government was merel}'^ a setting and 
support for the church. The founding of a new 
church establishment, after what they deemed the 
primitive model, was the heart of the enterprise. 
This is shown in many words uttered by the chief 
actors, and it appears in strong relief in an inci- 
dent that occurred soon after the arrival of Win- 
throp's company. Isaac Johnston, the wealthiest 
man of the party, succumbed to disease and hard- 
ship, but " he felt much rejoiced at his death that 
the Lord had been pleased to keep his eyes open 
so long as to see one church of Christ gathered 
before his death." Here we have the Puritan pas- 
sion for a church whose discipline and services 
should realize their ideals — a passion that in the 
stronger men suffered no abatement in the midst 
of the inevitable pestilence and famine that were 
wont to beset newly arrived colonists in that time. 

XIII. 

One salient fact in the history of the Massachu- 
setts Bay colony is the dominant influence of the 
example of Plymouth. The Puritans of the Massa- 
chusetts colony were not Separatists. No one had 
been more severe in controversy with the Separa- 
tists than some of the Puritans who remained in the 
Church of England. They were eagerly desirous 
not to be confounded with these schismatics. 
When the great migration of 1630 took place, the 



The Great Puritan Exodus. 



213 



emigrants published a pathetic farewell, protest- 
ing with the sincerity of homesick exiles their 
attachment to the Church of England, "ever ac- 
knowledging that such hope and part as we have 
obtained in the common salvation we have received 
in her bosom and sucked at her breasts." 

It is to be remembered that these Puritans did 
not agree among themselves. Puritanism was of 
many shades. There were some, like the Brownes 
whom Endecott sent out of the colony, that were 
even unwilling to surrender the prayer book. The 
greater part of the earlier Puritans had desired to 
imitate the Presbyterianism of Scotland and Ge- 
neva, and in Elizabeth's time they had organized 
presbyteries. Nothing seemed more probable be- 
forehand than the revival in New England of the 
presbyteries of the davs of Cartwright. But what 
happened was unexpected even by the Puritans. 
The churches of Massachusetts were formed on 
the model of John Robinson's Independency. 

There must have been a certain exhilarant reac- 
tion in the minds of the Puritans when at last they 
were clear of the English coast and free from the 
authority that had put so many constraints upon 
them. There were preachings and expoundings 
by beloved preachers with no fear of pursuivants. 
The new religious freedom was delightful to intoxi- 
cation. " Every day for ten weeks together," 
writes one passenger, they had preaching and ex- 
position. On one ship the watches were set by the 
Puritan captain with the accompaniment of psalm- 



Chap, IV. 



Differ- 
ences 
among the 
Puritans. 



Effect of 
emigra- 
tion. 



Roger 
Clap's 
Memoirs, 
40. 



>X 



214 



TJie Purita?i Migration. 



Book II. 



Note 9. 



Rise of the 
Congrega- 
tional 
form in 
New Eng- 
land. 



singing. Those who all their lives long had made 
outward and inward compromises between their 
ultimate convictions and their obligations to antag- 
onistic authority found themselves at length utter- 
ly free. It was not that action was freed from the 
restraint of fear, so much as that thought itself was 
freed from the necessity for politic compromises. 
Every ship thus became a seminary for discussion. 
Every man now indulged in the unwonted privi- 
lege of thinking his bottom thought. The ten- 
dency to swing to an extreme is all but irresistible 
in the minds of men thus suddenly liberated. To 
such enthusiasts the long-deferred opportunity to 
actualize ultimate ideals in an ecclesiastical vacuum 
would be accepted with joy. What deductions 
such companies would finally make from the hints 
in the New Testament was uncertain. The only 
sure thing was that every vestige of that which 
they deemed objectionable in the English church 
would be repressed, obliterated, in their new or- 
ganization. 

With the evils and abuses of the English church 
more and more exaggerated in their thoughts, the 
sin of separation readily came to seem less heinous 
than before. There was no longer any necessity 
for professing loyalty to the church nor any 
further temptation to think ill of those at Plym- 
outh, who, like themselves, had suffered much to 
avoid what both Separatists and Puritans deemed 
unchristian practices. A common creed and com- 
mon sufferings, flight from the same oppression to 



The Great Puritan Exodus. 



215 



find refuge in what was henceforth to be a com- 
mon country, drew them to sympathy and affection 
for their forerunners at Plymouth. The Plymouth 
people were not backward to send friendly help 
to the newcomers. The influence of the physician 
sent from Plymouth to Endecott's party in the pre- 
vailing sickness soon persuaded the naturally rad- 
ical Endecott to the Plymouth view of church gov- 
ernment. Winthrop's associates, or the greater 
part of them, drifted in the same direction, to their 
own surprise, no doubt. There was a lack of uni- 
formity in the early Massachusetts churches and 
some clashing of opinion. Some ministers left the 
colony dissatisfied ; one or more of the churches 
long retained Presbyterian forms, and some stanch 
believers in presbytcrial government lamented 
long afterward that New England ecclesiastical 
forms were not those of the Calvinistic churches 
of Europe. But the net result was that Robin- 
sonian independency became the established re- 
ligion in New England, whence it was transplanted 
to England during the Commonwealth, and later 
became the prevailing discipline among English 
dissenters. 

Thus the church discipline and the form of 
government in Massachusetts borrowed much from 
Pl3^mouth, but the mildness and semi-toleration — 
the "toleration of tolerable opinions" — which Rob- 
inson had impressed on the Pilgrims was not so 
easily communicated to their new neighbors who 
had been trained in another school. 



Chap. IV. 



Cotton to 
Salonstall 
in Hutch. 
Papers. 



Hubbard's 
Hist, of 
New Eng., 
117. 



Note 10. 



2l6 



The Puritan Mis^ration. 



Book II. 



Note I, 
page 191. 



Note 2, 
page 193. 



Note 3, 
page 199. 



Note 4, 
page 204. 



Elucidations. 

Morton's settlement has become the subject of a literature of 
its own, and of some rather violent and amusing discussion even 
in our times. Morton's New English Canaan has been edited by 
Mr. C. F. Adams for the Prince Society. His defensive account 
of himself leaves the impression that the author was just the sort 
of clever and reckless rake who is most dangerous to settlements 
in contact with savages, and who might be expelled neck and 
heels from a frontier community holding no scruples of a Puritan 
sort. The Royal Proclamation in Rymer's Foedera, xvii, 416 
(and Hazard's State Papers, i, 151), 1622, sets forth the evil of 
the sale of arms to the savages, but it was leveled at earlier 
offenders than Morton. Compare Sainsbury's Calendar, Septem- 
ber 29 and November 24, 1630, pp. 120, 122. There are also 
references, more or less extended, to Morton in the Massachu- 
setts Records, Winlhrop's Journal, Bradford's Phmouth Planta- 
tion, Dudley's Letter to the Countess of Lincoln in Young's 
Chronicles of Massachusetts, and in other early accounts. 

Abbott's account of Laud's rise, Rushworth, i, 440, is traced 
with a bitter pen, no doubt, but the student Laud, as Abbott 
draws him, is so much like his later self that one can not but 
believe that the description of him picking quarrels with the public 
readers and carrying information against them to the bishop has 
a basis of fact. 

Rushworth, writing under the later date of 1637, snys : "The 
severe Censures in Star Chamber, and the greatness of the Fines, 
and the rigorous Proceedings to impose Ceremonies, the sus- 
pending and silencing Multitudes of Ministers, for not reading in 
the Church the Book for Sports to be exercised on the Lord's 
day, caused many of the Nation, both Ministers and others, to 
sell their Estates, and to set Sail for New England (a late Planta- 
tion in America), where they hold a Plantation by Patent from 
the King." Part II, vol. i, p. 410. 

" We trust you will not be unmindful of the main end of our 
Plantation, by endeavouring to bring the Indians to a knowledge 
of the Gospel." Cradock's letter to Endecott, February 16, 1629, 
Young's Chronicle, 133; also the official letter, ibid., page 142, 
where the " propagation of the Gospel " among whites and 



The Great Puritan Exodus. 



217 



Indians is the "aim." The Royal Charter itself declared that 
" to win and invite the natives of the country to the knowledge 
and obedience of the only true God and Saviour of mankind . . . 
is the principal end of this Plantation." (A similar provision was 
inserted in the Connecticut Charter in 1662, in imitation of that 
of Massachusetts.) The common seal of the Massachusetts 
colony, sent over in 1629, bore an Indian with the inscription, 
" Come over and help us." Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, 
155, Instructions to Endecott. The paper of "Reasons," attrib- 
uted to Winthrop, keeps the conversion of the Indians in view, 
but it is blended with that which was in his mind the main end, 
the founding of a Puritan church. The first paragraph reads, 
" It will be a service to the Church of great consequence to carry 
the Gospell into those parts of the world, to helpe on the 
comminge of the fuUnesse of the Gentiles, & to raise a Bulworke 
against the kingdome of Ante-Christ which the Jesuites labour to 
reare up in those parts." Life and Letters of Winthrop, i, 309. 
The copy of this paper in Sir John Eliot's handwriting has a 
preamble written in a nervous style that may well be Eliot's own. 
This preamble goes back to the conversion of the Indians as a 
main purpose. The Antapologia of T. Edwards, 1644, declares 
that White of Dorchester and others had the conversion of the 
Indians in view in promoting emigration to New England. 
Edwards says, page 41, that the establishing of Congregational 
churches " was not in the thoughts of them that were the first 
movers in that or of the ministers that were sent over in the 
beginning." The statement is quite too strong, but the ecclesi- 
astical purpose seems to have grown rapidly when the number 
of emigrants revealed the greatness of the opportunity. 

Cotton Mather says, Magnalia, Book II, chap, iv, 3, that Win- 
throp was made a justice at eighteen, but Mather's account of any- 
thing marvelous needs support. W^inthrop held his first court 
at Groton Hall several months after he had attained his majority. 
Life and Letters, i, 62. Compare page 223 of the same volume. 

Of his election to the governorship he wrote to his wife, " The 
onely thinge that I have com forte of in it is, that heerby I have 
assurance that my charge is of the Lorde & that he hath called 
me to this worke." Life and Letters, i, 340. 

The government of the colony under Endecott was substan- 
tially that prescribed for " particular plantations " in the general 
order of the Virginia Company at the time the charter for the 



Chap. IV, 



Note 5, 
page 204. 



Note 6, 
page 205. 



Note 7, 
page 208. 



2l8 



TJic Puritan Migration. 



Book II, 



Note 8, 
page 210. 



Pilgrim colony was granted, and like that which was formed at 
Plymouth under the Compact. The Massachusetts form may 
have been borrowed from Plymouth. This may be considered 
the primary form of colony government in the scheme of the 
Virginia Company. The plan antedates the formation of the 
Virginia Company by at least twenty years, for it was a form 
proposed by Ralegh when, in 1 587, he organized his colony under 
the title : " The Governor and Assistants of the city of Ralegh 
in Virginia." The secondary form of government was that pre- 
scribed for Virginia in the charter of 161 8, which added a lower 
house elective by the people. This fully developed government 
could come only when the population had become large enough 
to render a representative system possible. 

It has been maintained by several writers that the charter had 
been worded with a view to remov'al. See, for example, Palfrey's 
New England, i, 307. But a paper read before the Massachu- 
setts Historical Society, and printed in the Proceedings for De- 
cember, 1869, by the late Charles Deane, shows that such a pre- 
sumption is groundless. In calling the subordinate government 
of Endecott " London's Plantation in Massachusetts Bay in New 
England," the company showed that it proposed to keep its head- 
quarters in London. It is open to question, however, whether 
Deane does not go too far in denying that the charter gave 
authority for the transfer. In that technical age the letter of the 
instrument would probably be counted more conclusive than at 
present, and the evidence of the dockets would have less weight. 
The removal of the government was not one of the charges made 
in the quo warranto proceedings against the company. On the 
main question compare also the very significant treatment of the 
subject by Winthrop in his paper on Arbitrary Government, Life 
and Letters, ii, 443, where he expressly says that it was intended 
to have the chief government in England, " and with much diffi- 
culty we gott it abscinded." It is to be remembered that the 
exercise of governmental functions by a commercial corporation 
was not a novel spectacle in that age. In 1620 the English and 
Dutch East India Companies, after having been at war while the 
two nations were allies, concluded a treaty of peace. No doubt 
the exercise of such powers by trading companies had been made 
familiar by the mingling of the functions of government with 
those of commerce by the merchants of the Hanse cities. The 
East India and the Hudson Bay Companies continued to exercise 
territorial jurisdiction until a very recent period. 



The Great Puritan Exodus. 



219 



This rebound from their previous attitude of compromise is 
well exemplified in the church covenant adopted at Dorchester, 
Mass., in 1636, under the lead of Richard Mather, which con- 
tains these words : " We do likewise promise by his Grace 
assisting us, to endeavour the establishing amongst ourselves all 
His Holy Ordinances which He hath appointed for His church 
here on Earth, . . . opposing to the utmost of our power whatso- 
ever is contrary thereto and bewailing from our Hearts our own 
neglect hereof in former times and our pointing ourselves therein 
with any Sinful Invention of men." Blake's Annals of Dorchester. 
Robinson of Leyden, in his Justification of Separation, 1610, de- 
clared that the Puritans would soon separate if they might have 
the magistrates' license ; and Backus, who quotes the passage (i, 
pp. 2, 3), remarks on the confirmation which the history of Massa- 
chusetts gives to Robinson's theory of conformity. 

In his Way of the Churches Cleared, controversial necessity 
drove Cotton to assert that Plymouth had small share in fixing 
the ecclesiastical order of Massachusetts, but he is compelled to 
admit its influence. " And though it bee," he says, " very likely, 
that some of the first commers might helpe their Theory by hear- 
ing and discerning their practice at Plymmouth : yet therein the 
Scripture is fulfilled, ' The Kingdome of Heaven is like unto 
leaven,' " etc., pp, 16, 17. 



Chap. IV. 

Note 9, 
page 214. 



K 



Note 10, 
page 215, 



-)< 



BOOK III. 

CENTRIFUGAL FORCES IN COLONY-PLANTING. 



Book III. 



Centrif- 
ugal 
forces. 



CHAPTER THE FIRST. 

THE CATHOLIC MIGRATION. 



At every new stage in the history of the Amer- 
ican settlement, we are afresh reminded that colo- 
nies are planted by the uneasy. The discontent 
that comes from pov^erty and financial reverse, that 
which is born of political unrest, and that which 
has no other cause than feverish thirst for novelty 
and hazardous adventure, had each a share in im- 
pelling Englishmen to emigrate. But in the seven- 
teenth century religion was the dominant concern 
— one might almost say the dominant passion — of 
the English race, and it supplied much the most 
efficient motive to colonization. Not only did it 
propel men to America, but it acted as a distrib- 
uting force on this side of the sea, producing sec- 
ondary colonies by expelling from a new plantation 
the discontented and the persecuted to make fresh 
breaks in the wilderness for new settlements. Con- 
necticut and Rhode Island were secondar)' plant- 
ings of this kind. Religious differences also made 



The Catholic Mi^-ration. 



221 



twain the Chesapeake region, the first home of the 
English in America, one of the two rival colonies 
being intolerantly Protestant, the other a home 
for Catholic refugees. 

II. 

George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore, who 
projected the Maryland colony and left it to his 
son to carry forward, belonged to the order of 
men who are shrewd without being creative — men 
of sagacity as differentiated from men of ideas. 
The man in whose mind there is a ferment of origi- 
nal ideas has theories to promulgate or expound. 
Sagacity has small necessity for speech — its very 
reticence gives an advantage in the conduct of 
affairs. The parliamentary antagonist and political 
rival who confronted Calvert was no other than 
our old acquaintance Sir Edwin Sandys, of the 
Virginia Company. Calvert and Sandys were 
alike men of rare accomplishments, and both were 
interested in schemes for colonization ; otherwise 
they were antipodal. Sandys was a statesman of 
advanced ideas, creative, liberal, and original, fit- 
ted to be the founder of representative govern- 
ment in the English colonies. In that age of worn 
and brittle institutions it was not deemed wholly 
safe to suffer so robust a thinker as Sandys to be 
alwa3'S at large, and it was one of Calvert's most 
difficult duties, as the king's secretary and chosen 
intermediary, to explain to Parliament why its 
leader was under restraint. Sandys, as we have 
already said, v/as described as " right-handed to 



Chap. I. 



Character 
of George 
Calvert. 



222 



Centrifugal Forces hi Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



every great employment " ; when Calvert came 
upon the scene, he was aptly characterized as " a 
forward and knowing person in matters relating to 
the state." The phrase denotes, perhaps, clever 
adroitness within the limits of that mediocrity which 
in those perilous times was a safeguard to the man 
who ventured into politics. After having started 
well at court, Sandys had fallen into irretrievable 
disfavor by his resolute advocacy of the liberties 
of his countrymen. The message to the Virginia 
Compan}^ already recited, " Choose the devil, but 
not Sir Edwin Sandys," expressed the depth of the 
king's antipathy. But if Sandys seemed to the 
king a devil, Calvert became for him a convenient 
angel. Notions about human rights and the liberty 
of Parliament did not obstruct Calvert's career. 
Not that he was a man to prove unfaithful to his 
convictions, as did his bosom friend Wentworth, 
or to suppress liberal opinions in order to smooth 
an ascending pathway, as did his great contem- 
porary Bacon. Calvert played a far simpler part 
and one less dishonorable. It was his fortune to 
be a man of facile mind, naturally reverential 
toward authority. The principles enunciated by 
his sovereign and the measures by which those in 
power sought to attain the end in view were pretty 
sure to seem laudable or at least excusable to him. 
Such a mind can not be called scrupulous, neither 
is it consciously dishonest. The quality most 
highly esteemed at the court of James was 
fidelitv, unswerving devotion to the interests of 



The CatJiolic Misrration. 



223 



the king and of one's friends. And this, the 
dominant virtue of his time and of his class — this 
honor of a courtier — Calvert possessed in a high 
degi-ee ; it is a standard by which he has a right 
to be judged. To a French ambassador he seemed 
an honorable, sensible, courteous, well-intentioned 
man, devoted to the interests of England, but with- 
out consideration or influence. 

Whatever his lack of influence in councils of 
state, Calvert's fidelitj-, useful abilities, and many 
accomplishments won the friendship of James, and 
in that lavish reign when all the fairy stories came 
true at a court which was " like a romance of 
knight errantry," as the Spanish minister declared, 
the favor of the king was sure to result in good 
fortune to the favorite. From being secretary to 
Burleigh, Calvert rose to be principal Secretary of 
State, was knighted, and at last ennobled. Grants 
of estates in Ireland and of great unexplored tracts 
of territory in the wilderness of America, pensions, 
sinecure offices, grants of money out of increased 
customs fees, and presents from those who had 
ends to serve at court, were the means by which 
a successful courtier bettered his estate, and by 
some or all of these Secretary Calvert thrived. 
That he did thrive is proved by the great sum he 
was able to lose in his futile attempt to plant a 
colony in Newfoundland. It was believed that he 
had accepted a share of the money dispensed lav- 
ishly in presents and pensions to English courtiers 
by Spain, but this Calvert denied, and one can be- 



Chap. I. 



Calvert's 
rise. 



Note I. 



224 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting 



Book III. 
Note 2. 



The col- 
ony of 
Avalon. 



Cal. S. P. 
America, 
pp. 25, 26, 
March 16, 
1620. 



Ok 



lieve that a man of his fidelity to king and country 
would be able to resist a temptation to which 
others succumbed. 

III. 

Calvert was very early interested in coloniza- 
tion. He was a member of the Virginia Company 
in 1609, and later one of the councilors for New 
England. In 1620 he was one of a commission ap- 
pointed to settle the affairs of a Scotch company 
for colonizing Newfoundland, and in the next year 
he dispatched his first colony to the southeastern 
peninsula of that island which he had bought from 
Sir William Vaughan. In this latter year (1621) he 
secured a grant of the whole vast island, but in 
1622 he accepted a re-grant of the peninsula alone, 
and this became his first proprietary colony. Cap- 
tain Whitbourne's pamphlet on Newfoundland was 
just then circulating gratuitously by the aid of col- 
lections made in the churches with the sanction of 
royal authority. It described a Newfoundland of 
Edenic fruitfulness. Even cool-headed statesmen 
like Calvert appear to have been captivated by the 
stories of this veteran seaman and weather-beaten 
romancer. Calvert called his new province Avalon. 
The name signifies the land of apples — that is, the 
fruitful country. In old British mythology it was 
the paradise of the blessed, the island in the west- 
ern seas to which King Arthur was translated in 
the famous legend. This name of promise suited 
the situation of the new island state, and fitted well 
the enthusiastic tales of Whitbourne and the 



TJie Catholic Migration. 



225 



groundless hopes of Calvert. The bleak New- 
foundland coast had already blossomed with fanci- 
ful names ; there was the Bay of Plesaunce and 
the Bay of Flowers, Robin Hood's Bay and the 
River of Bonaventure ; there was the Harbor of 
Formosa and the Harbor of Heartsease. Avalon, 
the earthly paradise, was but the complement of 

these. 

IV. 

Sir George Calvert probably drafted with his 
own hand — the hand of an expert and accom- 
plished man of the court — the charter of April 7, 
1623, that conferred on him an authority little 
short of sovereignty over his new territory. This 
masterpiece of dexterous charter-making afforded 
a model for other proprietary charters, and Cal- 
vert himself bettered it but little in the Maryland 
charter of a later date. The ambiguous passages 
in the Mar3dand charter, which have been ac- 
counted evidence of a design to make wa}^ for the 
toleration or even the possible dominance of Ro- 
man Catholicism, appear already in the charter of 
Avalon. Was the colony of 1621 or its charter of 
1623 intended to supply a refuge, if one should 
be needed, for Englishmen of the Catholic faith ? 
The question is not easily answered. The primary 
design of the Avalon colony was, no doubt, to 
better the fortunes of Sir George Calvert and to 
lift him and his successors into the authority and 
dignity of counts-palatine in the New World. But 

there can hardly be a doubt that, before the char- 
16 



Chap. I. 



Note 3. 



The char- 
ter of 
Avalon. 



Note 4. 



226 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 5. 



Calvert's 
conver- 
sion. 



Petition 
in Rush- 
worth, 
Part I, i, 
141. Com- 
pare Neal, 
Part II, 
c. ii. 



ter of 1623 was granted, Secretary Calvert was 
already a Catholic, secretly or latently, if not 
overtl3^ His charter of Avalon naturally left open 
a door for the toleration of the faith to which he 
was already attached, or toward which he was 
tendinsf. 



Calvert's conversion was almost inevitable. He 
favored the project for the Spanish match, and he 
was, like some other courtiers, under the influence 
of Gondomar, a consummate master of intrigue. 
He was bound by ties of friendship, and later by 
the marriage of his son, to Lord Arundel of 
Wardour, a Catholic, and the constitution of his 
mind and all the habits of a lifetime made him a 
lover of authority in church and state. Under fa- 
voring circumstances such a man becomes a Ro- 
man Catholic by gravitation and natural affinity. 

There was a Catholic revival in England at this 
time, especially among the courtiers and upper 
classes. In 1623 there was a large influx to Eng- 
land of priests and Jesuits. English Romanists 
flocked to the vicinage of London, and resorted in 
great numbers to the mass in the houses of foreign 
ambassadors ; and in many English country houses 
the mass was openly celebrated in defiance of law. 
The Commons, in alarm, adopted what James fitly 
called " a stinging petition against the papists." 



TJie CatJwlic Mio'ration. 



227 



VI. 

Calvert had staked his hopes for himself and 
for English Catholicism on the Spanish match. 
This otherwise pliant courtier was intractable 
where his religious convictions were concerned. 
He scrupled to draw back at the bidding of 
Charles and Buckingham, when drawing back in- 
volved a violation of the treaty oath of the king 
and council, the plunging of England into a Span- 
ish war, the sacrifice of the interests of the Catho- 
lic church, and a fresh exposure of his co-religion- 
ists in England to a harsh persecution. Calvert 
was one of that party in the junta for Spanish af- 
fairs which was unwilling to break a solemn treaty 
in order to gratify the w^ounded vanity of Buck- 
ingham and Charles, and he paid dearly for his 
firmness. To bring about his resignation, his an- 
tagonists diverted business from his office, thus 
reducing his fees and subjecting his pride to morti- 
fication. Under this treatment it was noted by a 
letter writer of the time that Mr. Secretary Cal- 
vert " droops and keeps out of the way." It was 
reported that he was ill, and then that he had been 
rebuked by the king and the prince, and it was 
known that he wished to sell his office to some one 
acceptable to Buckingham. Calvert's cleverness 
as a courtier did not fail him in his fall. He suc- 
ceeded at the last in mollifying Buckingham, whose 
consent he gained to the sale of the secretaryship. 
After nearly a year of the prolonged agony of 



Chap. I. 



His resig- 
nation. 



1624. 



228 



Centrifugal Forces in Colo7iy-Planting. 



Book III. 
1625. 



Note 6. 



Calvert 
deserts 
New- 
foundland. 



holding office in disfavor, he resigned in February, 
1625, receiving six thousand pounds for his office, 
which was worth to the incumbent two thousand a 
year. He was at the same time raised to the Irish 
peerage as Baron Baltimore. He made his re- 
ligious scruples the ostensible reason for his resig- 
nation, and he was already known to be " infinitely 
addicted to the Catholic faith." He made no se- 
cret of his proscribed religion ; he exposed to vis- 
itors the altar, chalice, and candlesticks in his best 
room ; and he catechised his children assiduously 
in the doctrines of the ancient church. At the 
accession of Charles he retired from the Privy 
Council rather than take an oath offensive to his 
conscience. 

VII. 

During the period of his decline from court 
favor Calvert's colony of Avalon probably suffered 
from neglect. He now gave his new leisure to the 
work of rescuing it. In 1627 he made a voyage 
to Newfoundland, taking a company of Catholic 
settlers and two priests. He went again in 16^. 
From Newfoundland he wrote to one of the Jes- 
uits in England a letter of affection, declaring 
his readiness to divide with him "the last bit" 
he had in the woi^ld. In Avalon beg-an the long" 
chapter of the troubles of the Baltimores with the 
Puritan opposition. Besides his contentions with 
Puritan settlers, who abhorred the mass as a Jew- 
ish prophet did idolatry, he found it necessary to 
fight with French privateers bent on plunder. By 



The Catholic Migration. 



229 



the time the almost interminable Newfoundland 
winter had begun, he discovered that Avalon was 
not the earthly paradise it appeared in the writ- 
ings of pamphleteers and in the letters of his 
own officeholders interested only in the continu- 
ance of their salaries. The icy Bay of Plesaunce 
and the bleak Bay of Flowers mocked him with 
their names of delight ; of little avail was the fast- 
bound River of Bonaventure to its unlucky lord, 
or the Harbor of Heartsease to him who had sunk 
a fortune of thirty thousand pounds in the fruitless 
attempt to plant a settlement on a coast so cold. 
Ill himself, and with half his company down with 
scurvy, some of them dying, Baltimore turned his 
thoughts toward Virginia, now, after all its trials, 
prosperous under a genial sun. 

He knew the conditions of that colony and the 
opportunities it afforded. A member of the Vir- 
ginia Company during nearly all the years of its 
stormy existence, he had been made one of the 
fifty-six councilors that took over its effects at its 
demise, and he was one of the eight who consti- 
tuted the quorum, and who probably transacted 
the business of this Council for Virginia. Even 
under the government of the Company there had 
been precedents for the establishment of a "pre- 
cinct " within Virginia independent of the James- 
town government. Such a plantation had been 
that of Captain Martin and that proposed by Rich 
and Argall, and a charter for such had been given 
to the Leyden pilgrims. Baltimore wrote to ask 



Chap. I. 

Letters of 
Wynne, 
Daniel, 
and H OS- 
kins, in 
Whit- 
bourne's 
second ed. 

Note 7. 



Sails to 
Virginia. 



Rymer's 
Foedera, 
torn, vii, 
iv, 147. 



2^0 



Centrifugal Fo?tcs in Colony -Planting. 



Book III. 



Virginia 
antago- 
nism. 



Note 8. 



for a precinct, pleading the king's promise already 
made that he might choose a part of Virginia. 
Here he would still be the head of a little inde- 
pendent state — a state in which the mass might 
be said without molestation. Before another win- 
ter set in he abandoned Avalon to fishermen and 
such hardy folk, and took ship for the James 
River, where he arrived in October, 1629. 

VIII. 

Baltimore's reception in Virginia was most in- 
hospitable. He had perhaps counted on his former 
relation to the colony as a councilor to assure him 
a welcome. But the Virginians of that time were 
Sandys and Southampton men. They may have 
remembered that Calvert had been Sandys's enemy 
and political rival, and that he belonged to the 
faction of Sir Thomas Sm3^th in the company. 
The members of that faction had been the execu- 
tioners of the company when they could no longer 
control it. Calvert was one of the later council, 
which had tried to take away insidiously the privi- 
leges granted to Virginians by their charter from 
the Virginia Company. This attack on their liber- 
ties they had stoutly resisted, even to cutting off a 
piece of one of the ears of the clerk of their own 
assembly for abetting it. Now a nobleman of the 
detested faction, an advocate of absolute govern- 
ment and a close friend of the king, had come 
among them. Baltimore might easily expect to 
secure the governorship of Virginia itself. Per- 



TJie Catholic Migratioji. 



231 



haps it is hardly necessary to go even so far 
afield for a motive. The prospect of a settle- 
ment of Roman Catholics within the limits of the 
colony was in itself enough to excite the oppo- 
sition of the Virginia churchmen. Baltimore's 
party of Catholics was not the only one repelled 
from Virginia about this time. Soon after Lord 
Baltimore's visit, perhaps, or just before, the Vir- 
ginians refused permission to a company of Irish 
Catholics to settle within their bounds. These ap- 
pear to have gone afterward to the island of St. 
Christopher's, where again Protestant fellow-colo- 
nists fell out with them about religion, so that they 
were finally sent to settle the neighboring island of 
Montserrat. 

The Virginians, after all their sufferings, were 
now prosperous in a gross way, reaping large 
profits from tobacco, and living in riotous profusion 
after the manner of men beginning to emerge from 
the hardships and perils of a pioneer condition into 
sudden opulence. Their rude living did not at all 
prevent the colonists from being fastidious about 
their religion— it was the seventeenth century. 
Most of the Virginia clergy at this period were as 
reckless in life as the people, but the Protestantism 
of the colony was incorruptible. Some of the rab- 
ble even showed their piety by railing at the newly 
arrived papist nobleman. 

A weapon of defense against Baltimore was 
ready to hand. Three years before his coming in- 
structions had been sent from England to Yeardley 



Chap. I. 



Note 9. 



Character 
of the 
early Vir- 
ginians. 



Leah and 

Rachel, 

and De 

Vries 

Voyages, 

passim. 



Expulsion 
of Balti- 
more. 



232 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



MS. Book 
of Instruc- 
tions, Li- 
brary of 
Cong^ress, 
folio 136, 



Balti- 
more's 
zeal. 



to proffer the oath of supremacy " to all such as 
come thither with an intention to plant and reside, 
which, if any shall refuse, he is to be retorned or 
shipped from thence home." This order may not 
have been intended for so great a personage as a 
nobleman of the Court. It may have been meant 
only to head off humble Irishmen like those who 
settled Montserrat, or it may have been merely a 
fence against Separatists. But it served the turn 
of the alarmed colonists. Pott and Mathews, Clai- 
borne and Roger Smyth, who led the opposition, 
offered the oath to Baltimore. Baltimore had 
sacrificed his place in the Privy Council rather 
than take this oath so contrary to his conscience, 
and he now again stood by his religious convictions, 
and took ship for England as ordered by the Vir- 
ginia Council. He was disappointed and already 
shaken in health. The members of the council, ap- 
palled at their own boldness, perhaps, wrote to the 
king in self-defense. There is still extant an old 
manuscript record book of the seventeenth century 
which contains the instructions to Yeardley. Im- 
mediately following, as if to put it under the shelter 
of royal authority, is the report of the council, 
without date or signature, that the oath had been 
offered to Baltimore and refused. 

IX. 

Baltimore's hardships during two voyages to 
Newfoundland, and a winter in the rude abodes of 
pioneers there, his illness during that winter, the 



The Catholic Migration. 



233 



constant spectacle of sickness and death about him, 
and the disappointment caused by his rude recep- 
tion in Virginia, were enough, one would think, to 
have broken his resolution. He went back to Eng- 
land " much decayed in his strength," as he con- 
fessed ; but, strangely enough, this accomplished 
man of the world, whose career had been that of a 
courtier, was far from living in ease and quiet- 
ness as his friends had expected him to do. He 
was possessed of a passion for peopling the wilder- 
ness. He had written to the king from America 
that he was resolved to spend " the poore remayn- 
der " of his days in colony-planting, his " inclina- 
tions carrying him naturally " to such work. To 
what extent he was prompted by a desire to leave 
to his heir the semi-sovereignty of a principality, 
and how far he was carried by a naturally ad- 
venturous temper hitherto latent, we have no 
means of deciding ; but one can hardly resist the 
conclusion that a fervent religious zeal was the 
underlying spring of a resolution so indomitable. 
Like many another man of that time, Calvert was 
lifted from worldliness to high endeavor by re- 
ligious enthusiasm. The king felt obliged to in- 
terpose his authority ; he forbade Baltimore's 
risking his life in another voyage, but he granted 
him a charter for a new palatinate on the north 
side of the Potomac. 

Lord Baltimore was doomed never to see the 
desire of his eyes. He died on the 15th of April, 
1632, before the charter had passed, leaving the 



Chap. I. 



Death of 
the first 
Lord 
Baltimore. 



234 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Plajiting. 



Book III. 



The char- 
ter of 

Maryland. 



planting of Maryland to be carried forward by his 
son and heir, Cecilius. The charter of Maryland 
passed the seals on the 22d of the following June in 
favor of Cecilius, the second Lord Baltimore. 

X. 

The Maryland charter was no doubt the work 
of George Calvert's own hand. Its main provi- 
sions are identical with those of Avalon ; but it 
put the proprietary in a still better position. He 
held Avalon by knight's service, Maryland in free 
and common soccage, and the holdings of Mary- 
land settlers would be under the proprietary, not 
under the crown. In fact, the crown retained 
practically no rights of value in Maryland beyond 
the bare allegiance of the settlers. Larger privi- 
leges of trade were conceded to Maryland than had 
been given to Avalon, In one respect the liberties 
of the future settlers were apparently better 
guarded in the INIaryland charter, for there is a 
faint promise of a representative government in its 
phraseology. But even this was not definitely 
assured. In a single regard the charter of Marj-- 
land appears less favorable to the Catholic re- 
ligion than its predecessors. Historic specialists 
with a religious bias, doing their small best to 
render the current of history turbid, have not failed 
to convince themselves by means of the new 
clause that Maryland was a Protestant colony. 
The patronage and advowsons of all churches had 
been conferred on the proprietary in the Avalon 



TJie CatJiolic Mis^ration. 



235 



charter, and a like concession is made in the Mary- 
land grant ; but to this, in the Maryland charter, is 
attached a sort of " lean-to " — a qualifying clause 
that appears to limit the ecclesiastical organization 
of the colony to Anglican forms. " Together with 
license and power," runs the charter, " to build and 
found Churches, Chapels and Oratories in conven- 
ient and fit places within the premises, and to cause 
them to be dedicated and consecrated according to 
the ecclesiastical laws of our kingdom of England." 
In 1632 the Baltimore family was openly Catholic. 
The Puritans were raging against every indulgence 
shown by the court to Romanists. The clamor of 
the Catholic-baiters did not stop with a demand 
that Romanists should be expelled from England. 
The Commons had a few years earlier petitioned 
the King that they be excluded from "all other 
Your Highness's dominions." The founding of an 
English colony that might make a home for Eng- 
lish and Irish Romanists was a more difficult proj- 
ect in the reign of Charles than it had been in the 
time of James when Avalon was granted. The 
clause which allowed Baltimore to dedicate his 
churches according to the ecclesiastical laws of 
England excites admiration. It graciously permit- 
ted an Anglican establishment in Maryland ; it did 
not oblige Baltimore to do anything at all, nor 
did it, in fact, put any constraint whatever on his 
actions in this regard. The impotent clause which 
seemed to limit, but did not limit, the ecclesiastical 
organization was breathlessly followed by one far 



Chap. I, 



Note 10. 



Rush- 
worth, 
Part I, vol, 
i, 141, 1623. 



Note II. 



236 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 12. 



Condition 
of English 
Catholics. 



from impotent — a masterpiece of George Calvert's 
skill. It gave to the proprietary the legal power 
exercised from ancient times by the Bishops of 
Durham as counts-palatine. The regalities of Dur- 
ham having been pared down by Henry VIII, the 
charter somewhat furtively reached back after the 
local absolutism of the middle ages by giving Bal- 
timore all the temporal power ever possessed by 
any Bishop of Durham. But if alarm should be 
taken at the giving of powers so vast to a Roman 
Catholic subject, there might be reassurance for 
timid souls in a clause in imitation of older char- 
ters than Calvert's, which stipulated that no inter- 
pretation should be put upon the charter by which 
God's holy and true Christian religion might be 
prejudiced. Ambiguity spread from the charter 
to some of the early Maryland laws, which wore 
a Protestant or a Catholic face according to the 
side from which they were approached. 

XI. 

When George Calvert projected his new south- 
ern colony he had every reason to suppose that it 
would be quickly supplied with settlers from the 
discontented English and Irish Catholics. The 
statute enacted in the third year of James, soon 
after the Gunpowder Plot, put those who adhered 
to the Roman communion in a precarious and 
exasperating situation. For the first year that a 
Catholic wholly neglected the sacraments of the 
English church he must pay twenty pounds. This 



TJie Catholic Mio;ratio7i. 



237 



was raised to forty the second year, and to sixty 
for every year of conscientious abstention there- 
after. If he did not attend the parish church at all, 
the luxury of a conscience cost him twenty pounds 
a month, which, as money then went, was a large 
sum. If he were a rich landholder, the king might 
take the use or rentals of two thirds of his land 
until he should conform. The oath of allegiance 
by which he was to be tested was made ingeniously 
offensive to a Catholic conscience. If a Romanist 
should persuade a Protestant to accept his own 
faith he was guilty of treason, as was also his con- 
vert. The man who harbored a Roman Catholic 
neglecting to attend the parish church was to be 
fined ten pounds a month. Marriage by a Rom- 
ish priest invalidated accruing land tenures. The 
Catholic was not suffered to send his children be- 
yond seas for an education, nor yet to keep a 
schoolmaster of his own faith ; he could not serve 
as an executor ; he might not have the charge of 
any child ; his house might be searched for Catholic 
books ; he was not allowed to keep weapons ; and 
when at last his vexed and troubled life was over, 
his dead body might not be buried among the 
graves of his forefathers in the parish churchyard. 

The administration of this law was attended by 
many aggravations. The pursuivants took the 
very cattle and household goods of the poor; from 
the rich they exacted large payments, failing 
which, they pounced on valuable plate and jewels, 
which they seized under pretense that these were 



Chap. I. 

An act for 
the better 
discovering 
and re- 
pressing of 
popish re- 
cusants. 
Also, An 
act to pre- 
vent, etc., 
3 Jac. I, 
chaps, iv 
and V. 



Adminis- 
tration of 
the \3l}N. 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 

Lingard, 
viii, i8g, 
cites Ry- 
raer, xxii, 
13 ; Hard- 
wicke 
Papers, 
1446, and 
a private 
letter. 

Influence 
of foreign 
policy. 



15S3, 

reprinted 

16S8. 



1609, 
sm. 4to, 
pp. 112. 



Ellis Col- 
lection, 
first series, 
iii, 12S. 



articles of superstition or the concealed property 
of Jesuits. It is said that James derived a revenue 
of thirty-six thousand pounds a year from the fines 
of lay Catholics. To the several Scotch favorites of 
the king were assigned certain rich recusants from 
whom they might squeeze whatever could be got 
by the leverage of the law. 

Very embarrassing to the foreign policy of 
England was the severity of English laws against 
Catholics, and Lord Treasurer Burleigh found it 
needful to publish in Elizabeth's time, for circula- 
tion in all the courts of Europe, a treatise on The 
Execution of Justice in England and the Mainte- 
nance of Public Order and Christian Peace; and 
in the following reign James himself turned pam- 
phleteer and published an Apologie for the Oath 
of Allegiance. There were periods when pressure 
from abroad softened the administration of the law. 
But it was only irregularly and intermittently that 
the Government could be brought to grant in- 
dulgences that roused the pious wrath of Puritans 
and reduced the revenue of the king and his 
favorites. If Spain, and afterward France, made it 
a condition precedent to a marriage treaty that the 
penal laws against English recusants should be re- 
laxed, Parliament, resenting foreign dictation, de- 
manded of the king a renewal of the severities 
against papists. Twenty-four Catholics suffered 
capitally in James's reign, before 1618; and when 
in 1622 it was necessary to condone Catholicism in 
order to conciliate Spain, it is said that four hun- 



The CatlLolic Migration. 



239 



dred Jesuits and priests were set free on bail at one 
time. Tlie number of Catholics, lay and cleric, 
released in this year is put at four thousand, but 
this may be an exaggeration. 

XII. 

In 1627, and again in 1628, Lord Baltimore took 
Catholics with him to Newfoundland and settled 
priests there. The English court was just then 
sailing on a Protestant tack, and England had allied 
itself with the Huguenots of La Rochelle. An- 
other of the good works by which the government 
of Charles and Buckingham was endeavoring to 
prove its sanctification was the enforcement of the 
penal statutes against Roman Catholics. It is 
notable that Baltimore sailed with the first Catholic 
emigrants to Avalon about the time of the setting 
in of the movement toward Massachusetts which 
swelled at length into the great Puritan exodus. 
The five years of delay caused by the change from 
Avalon to INIaryland, and also perhaps by the ex- 
haustion of Baltimore's resources and his death, 
was unfavorable to the project of a Catholic prov- 
ince. The English government by 1634 had grown 
more lenient tov/ard Romanists, the co-religion- 
ists of the queen. The work at which Laud kept 
all hands busy just then was the suppression of 
Puritanism, and thousands of Puritans were by this 
time shaking the dust of England from their feet 
and seeking a home in the western wilderness, 
persuaded that the Church of England under Laud 



Chap. i. 

Neal, ii, 
ch. ii. 
Rapin, 
215, 2d ed. 



Catholic 
emigra- 
tion small. 



240 



Ctutrifngal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 

Harl. Mis- 
cell., ii, 
492, and 
following, 
where pas- 
sages from 
contempo- 
rary writers 
are quoted. 



Balti- 
more's 
partners. 



Note 13. 



The reli- 
gious aim. 



had all sails set for Rome. This illusion regarding- 
the purposes of the archbishop and his party, 
which alarmed the Puritans, heartened the Catho- 
lics, who naturally preferred to stay at home where 
a flood tide seemed to be setting toward Catholi- 
cism. The small Catholic migration to Maryland 
was not to be compared with that stream of Puri- 
tan emigration that about this time poured into 
New England twenty thousand people in a decade. 
The fall of Laud and the rise of the Puritans to 
power put a complete stop to the New England 
migration, but it failed to quicken the Catholic 
movement, for Maryland herself had become sadly 
involved in the civil commotions of the time. 

Cecilius Calvert undoubtedly counted on a 
large migration of Catholic recusants, and the 
documents show that the Jesuit order in England 
took great interest in the movement. The second 
Lord Baltimore was joined by partners in the 
financial risks of the venture, and though we meet 
with more than one allusion to these adventurers 
whose interest in the colony was apparently still 
active twenty years after its beginning, they were 
profoundly silent partners ; their names are no- 
where recorded, and we are left to conjecture the 
origin of their interest in Maryland. 

XIII. 

" The first and most important design of the 
jNIost Illustrious Baron, which ought also to be the 
aim of the rest, who go in the same ship, is, not to 



The Catholic Mi;^ration. 



241 



think so much of planting fruits and trees in a land 
so fertile, as of sowing- the seeds of religion and 
piety." This was Lord Baltimore's authoritative 
declaration, and because it varies in form from the 
stock phrases so common at the time, it bears an 
air of some sincerity, though it is diplomatically 
ambiguous. 

Baltimore's opponents made great exertions 
to prevent the departure of the Ark and the 
Dove, which were to bear faithful Catholics 
across the flood to a new world. A story was 
started that these ships were carrying nuns to 
Spain, and another tale that found believers was 
that they had soldiers on board going to France to 
serve against the English. It was told that Cal- 
vert's men had abused the customs officers at 
Gravesend, and sailed without cockets in contempt 
of all authority, the people on board refusing the 
oath of allegiance. The Ark was stopped and 
brought back by order of the Privy Council, and 
the oath of allegiance was given to a hundred and 
twenty-eight passengers. But the ships came to 
again at the Isle of Wight, and when they got 
away at last there were near three hundred pas- 
sengers on board, including Jesuit priests. Most of 
the passengers were "laboring men"; how many 
were Catholic and how many Protestant it is im- 
possible now to tell. That the leaders and the 
gentry were, most of them, Catholics there is 
every reason to believe. The passengers called 
Protestants were rather non-Catholics, precisely 
17 



CilAK I. 



Efforts to 
obstruct 

the ships. 



Letters of 

Baltimore 

to Went- 

worth in 

Strafford 

papers, 

passim. 



242 



Ce7itrifiigal Forces in Colony -Plant i7ig. 



Book III. 



Note 14. 



Tolera- 
tion, 



Note 15. 



Toleration 
a policy. 



the kind of emigrants that would give the Jesuits 
the converts of which they tell exultantly in their 
letters. There was no Protestant minister on 
board, nor was there the slightest provision for 
Protestant worship, present or future. 

XIV. 

Toleration was the Baltimore policy from the 
beginning. It was no doubt in the original plan of 
George Calvert and his associates, whoever they 
were. The Provincial of the Society of Jesus pri- 
vately furnished Baltimore with arguments in de- 
fense of this policy before the first colony sailed. 
The founders of Maryland were men of affairs 
shaping plan to opportunity, and the situation was 
inexorable. Toleration and protection was all that 
English Roman Catholics could hope to find in 
traveling thus to the ends of the earth. 

Cecilius gave positive instruction that on ship- 
board acts of the Roman Catholic religion should 
be performed with as much privacy as possible, so 
as not to offend the Protestant passengers " where- 
by any just complaint ma)'- hereafter be made by 
them in Virginia or in England." There is no pre- 
tense of theory here ; all is based on the exigency 
of the situation and sound policy. The policy was 
George Calvert's, whose school was the court of 
James, and whose whole career shows that he en- 
tertained no advanced views of human liberty. 
Had he held toleration as a theory of government, 
his doctrine would have been more liberal than 



TJie CatJiolic Migration. 



243 



that of Ralegh and Bacon and far in advance of 
that of contemporary Puritan leaders. They quite 
misunderstand the man who regard him as a pro- 
gressive thinker ; he was a conservative oppor- 
tunist. Still less was Cecilius a man likely to act 
on general principles. 

XV. 

We have seen how religiously the Puritans 
passed their time at sea in long daily expositions of 
Scripture and other devotions, and that sometimes 
even the watch was set with a psalm. Not less re- 
ligious were the Catholic pilgrims, and though the 
form is strikingly different, the believing and zeal- 
ous age is the same. To make things safe, the 
Jesuit fathers committed the principal parts of 
the ship in some detail to the protection of God 
in the first place, and then to that " of His Most 
Holy Mother and of St. Ignatius and of all the 
angels of Maryland." These angels to whom the 
safety of Maryland was committed were kept busy 
by special spiritual opponents. A dangerous storm 
was raised on one occasion by all the " malignant 
spirits of the tempest and all the evil genii of 
Maryland." But Father White circumvented this 
combination of ordinary storm spirits with imps of 
Protestant proclivities by setting forth to Christ 
and the Blessed Virgin, while the storm was at its 
worst, " that the purpose of this journey was to 
glorify the Blood of our Redeemer in the salva- 
tion of the Barbarians, and also to build up a king- 



Chap. I. 



Religious 
observ- 
ance at 
sea. 



Relatio 
Itineris, 
p. 10. 



Note 16. 



244 



Centrifugal Forces m Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 

Relatio 
Itineris, 
i6, 17. 



The 
arrival, 



dom for the Saviour and to consecrate another 
gift to the Immaculate Virgin his mothei"." The 
last clause apparently refers to Marj^and, as if it 
were named in honor of the Virgin. The repre- 
sentation was effective ; the good father had scarce- 
ly ceased speaking when the storm began to abate. 
The Puritans when using a geographical name 
that began with the woi'd " saint " scrupulously un- 
canonized it by leaving off the prefix. But these 
devout pilgrims of the Roman faith, when once the 
saints and guardian angels of Maryland had piloted 
them safe in spite of the malice of storm spirits 
and evil genii into landlocked waters and the 
bounds of Lord Baltimore's grant, proceeded to 
sanctify the whole region by sprinkling it with the 
names of saints and angels from Michael the arch- 
angel downward. The ancient Indian designations 
were marks of a heathenism they purposed to over- 
throw, and they began by trying to get rid of the 
whole " bead roll of unbaptized names." No con- 
venient island, creek, river, bay, or cape escaped 
Christian baptism. On Annunciation Day, 1634, 
they landed on Heron Island, in the Potomac, which 
they named appropriately for St. Clement, who was 
martyred by being thrown into the sea attached to 
an anchor, and here the sacrifice of the mass was 
celebrated, the worshipers reflecting that " never 
before had this been done in this part of the world," 
After the mass they took upon their shoulders a 
great cross hewn out of a tree and advanced in 
order to the place appointed, where the governor 



TJie Catholic Misrration. 



245 



and his assistants took part in its erection. The 
Catholics of the party, seeing this symbol of the 
faith erected in a new land, knelt upon the ground 
and recited the litanies of the cross in a kind of re- 
ligious ecstasy. Here in another form was that 
tender attachment to their faith that one finds 
among the more devout Protestant exiles, and in 
the nobler natures there was doubtless that element 
of the heroic and the saintl}' often evolved in the 
religious suffei'ings and activities of that da}- — a re- 
lief to the pettiness of the debates and the irksome- 
ness of the bigotries of the as:e. 

XVI. 

The colony had been named Maryland by King 
Charles in honor of his wife Henrietta Maria ; at 
least there was assigned to the king responsibility 
for a name that, like nearly everything else about 
Maryland, was ambiguous. But the phrase Terra 
Mari<2 in the charter, though represented there to 
be the equivalent of Maryland, was significant to a 
devout Catholic of something better than a compli- 
ment to a Catholic queen. The Indian village 
which with its gardens and cornfields had been 
bought for the germinal settlement and capital, 
took the name of St. Mary's, and the Avhole in- 
fant colony is called the Colony of St. Maries, by 
its own Legislative x\ssembly in 1638, as though by 
Maryland were intended the land of Mary. Not- 
withstanding the manifest care of the second Lord 
Baltimore to hold the missionaries within the limits 



Chap. I. 



A Catholic 
colony. 



Compare 
Clarke's 
Gladstone 
and Mary- 
land Tol- 
eration. 



Maryland 
Archives, i, 
23- 



246 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Excerpta 
de Diversis 
Literis, 
etc., 56-60. 



of worldly prudence, the zealous fathers lived and 
labored in a spirit of other-worldliness. They 
set themselves first of all to convert those sheep 
without a shepherd, the Protestants of Maryland. 
Some of these appear to have been men of reckless 
and immoral lives, who were greatly bettered by 
an acceptance of religious restraint. Those non- 
Catholics who were ill, and those who found them- 
selves languishing and dying in the wilderness 
without the consolations of their own religion, 
were zealously visited and converted in extremis by 
the Jesuits. The servants and mechanics employed 
by or apprenticed to the missionaries were brought 
under their constant influence and were readily 
won. Nearly all the Protestants who arrived in 
1638 were swiftly brought over to the faith of the 
missionaries, and twelve converts were joyously 
reckoned as fruits of the Jesuit labors in 1639. 
There was more than one instance, of the miracu- 
lous, or at least of the marvelous, to help on this 
work. One man of noble birth, who had by dissi- 
pation brought himself to desperate straits, and 
then sunk until he became at length a bond serv- 
ant in Maryland, embraced Catholicism. After the 
death of this convert a very bright light was some- 
times seen burning about his place of burial, and 
even those who were not Catholics were permitted 
to see this wonder. The horrible punishments that 
resulted from the Divine wrath against those who 
scoffingly rejected the Catholic faith in Maryland 
remind one of the equal calamities that befell those 



The Catholic Miscration. 



247 



who were unfaithful to Puritanism in New Eng- 
land. Seventeenth-century Englishmen with sky- 
wide differences in opinion were one in the traits 
that belonged to their age. Father White was sure 
that the destruction of Indians in Maryland was 
specially ordered by God to provide an opening 
" for His own everlasting law and light " ; but not 
more sure than were the Puritans that the cruel 
plague which exterminated whole villages on the 
Massachusetts coast was sent to open a way for the 
planting of Calvinistic churches. Each division 
of Christians in turn reduced the Almighty Creator 
to the level of a special tutelary divinity, some- 
times to that of a rather vindictive genius of the 
place. 

In this work of propagandism the missionaries 
did not forget the red men. Their labors among 
the aborigines were fairly successful at first, then 
interrupted by relapse and by war. Such is 
the history of Indian missions. Much was made 
of the solemn profession and baptism of an In- 
dian " king," at which the governor and other 
distinguished men " honored by their presence the 
Christian sacraments," the governor marching be- 
hind the neophyte in the procession. Maryland 
was in fact openly a Catholic colony until after 
1640. 

But as a Catholic colony it was a failure. In 
fear of the rising Puritan tempest in England, or 
the violent opposition on several grounds of its 
stronger neighbor Virginia, and of the mutinous 



Chap. I. 



Note 17. 



Failure to 
make a 
Catholic 
state. 



248 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note i8. 



Note 19. 



Opposi- 
tion to 
Maryland. 



bigotry of its own Puritan settlers, who regarded 
Baltimore's government as a " Babylon " to be 
overthrown, it was never able to afford to Catho- 
lics perfect security, much less was it able to 
promise them domination. But the Catholics in- 
cluded most of the rich and influential families, and 
it was a Jesuit boast that they were superior to 
other American settlers in breeding and urbanity. 
As they had choice of the best land in the province, 
the Catholic families remained during the whole 
colonial period among the most prominent people 
of Maryland. There is also evidence that the 
Catholics were numerically considerable in propor- 
tion to the population, though the reports on the 
subject are vague and conflicting. In 1641 they 
were about one fourth of the whole. The ranks of 
the early Catholic settlers, both of the rich and 
poor, seem to have been recruited from Ireland 
as well as from England, but the Maryland gov- 
ernment in Queen Anne's Protestant time passed 
acts levying an import tax of twenty pounds on 
each Irish Catholic servant, in order that the bond 
servants and even the transported convicts in 
Maryland should be orthodox Protestants. 

XVII. 

George Calvert, the first Baron Baltimore, 
molded the Maryland enterprise until the drafting 
of the charter, and his spirit was felt in it after his 
death. Cecilius, his son, was a man of a somewhat 
different sort, and his traits became more apparent 



TJic Catliolic Mizratioji. 



249 



as time went on. He was strongly supported at 
court by Strafford, his father's most devoted and 
obliged friend, and no doubt also by the queen, 
who was godmother to Maryland. The opposi- 
tion to Maryland was probably embittered by the 
hatred to Strafford and the jealousy of a Catholic 
queen. 

On his enemies in Virginia the younger Balti- 
more took ample vengeance. He got one of the 
queen's household appointed treasurer of the 
colony, and the Virginians found themselves 
obliged to pay the quitrents, which had been 
neglected and apparently forgotten. Other officers 
of the colony were nominated by Baltimore. Har- 
vey, the governor, hoping to collect money due 
him from the royal treasury by Baltimore's assist- 
ance, was his obsequious tool, to the bitter indig- 
nation of the Virginians, who hated Baltimore not 
only because he was a Romanist, but also because 
he had divided the first colony and cut off the 
northern Indian trade from Virginia. In conse- 
quence of the quarrel between Harvey and the 
Virginians over Maryland there ensued a revolu- 
tion in Virginia ; Harvey was shipped to England 
by the same bold men who had sent the first Lord 
Baltimore packing. But Harvey was sent back 
again by the king, and by this counter revolution 
the colonial constitution of Virginia was modified 
for the worse. It was altogether an exquisite re- 
venge. 

Cecilius meditated even a bolder stroke. He 



Chap. I. 



The sec- 
ond Lord 
Baltimore 
and Vir- 
ginia. 



Note 20. 



250 



Centrifugal Forces in Colouy-Plantiiig. 



Book III. 

Baltimore 
seeks to 
control 
Virginia. 



Note 21. 



Cautious 
policy of 
Baltimore. 



Baltimore's 
instruc- 
tions, 15 
Nov., 1633, 
Calvert 
Papers. 



schemed through Windebank to have himself made 
governor of Virginia, promising to wring out of it 
eight thousand pounds more of revenue for the 
king from some neglected sources. To achieve 
this, he proposed a scheme by which Windebank 
was to impose on the king's credulity. Secretary 
Windebank may have recoiled from the part he 
was to play ; it is certain that Charles was not 
persuaded to hand over Virginia bound hand and 
foot into the power of the proprietary of the rival 
colony. 

XVIII. 

Intolerance on the part of the authorities of 
Maryland directed toward Protestants might have 
brought a swift overthrow of the whole project. 
The instructions given for the first voyage already 
cited show throughout the need for extreme cau- 
tion in the face of extreme peril. It is required of 
the governor and commissioners that " they be 
very careful to preserve the peace amongst all the 
passengers on shipboard, and that they sufTer no 
scandal nor offense to be given to any of the Prot- 
estants." The rulers are to instruct the Catholics 
to be silent " upon all occasions of discourse con- 
cerning matter of religion," and those in authority 
are to " treat the Protestants with as much mild- 
ness and favor as justice will permit." These in- 
structions were to hold good after landing, and 
in one notable case of religious dissension after 
the arrival in Maryland, justice was meted out 
against the Catholic offender in a way that showed 



TJie Catliolic Migration. 



251 



a disposition to observe this policy of conciliation 
toward Protestants at the expense of some unfair- 
ness toward Catholics. Very early a proclamation 
was issued for the suppression of all religious dis- 
putes, and Copley, the business administrator of 
the Jesuits, thought they ought to be put down for 
fear the writings should be sent to the governor 
of Virginia. 

The ambiguous charter of Maryland was a 
necessary hypocrisy. The plan of toleration was 
also inevitable, and it was carried no further than 
necessit)'- required, for in that age, when toleration 
was odious, a liberal policy had also its perils. 
The Act for Church Liberties of 1639 was a fine 
example of the studied ambidexterity of the Ma- 
ryland government. It was enacted " that Holy 
Church within this province shall have all her 
rights, liberties, and immunities, safe, whole, and 
inviolate in all things." Holy Church here is a 
deliberate substitution for "the Church of Eng- 
land " in a similar phrase of Magna Charta. Such 
an act v/as worthy of Bunyan's Mr. Facing-both- 
ways. Interpreted by judges holding office at the 
will of a Catholic proprietary, it could have but 
one meaning. For the outside world it might 
bear another sense. It did all that could be done 
in the circumstances for the Roman Catholic re- 
lisfion and for Catholic ecclesiastics. 



Chap. I, 



Necessary 
ambi- 
guity. 



Note 22. 



252 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting: 



Book III. 



Puritan 
settlers 
invited. 



Note 23, 



Win- 
throp's 
Journal, ii, 
148, 149. 



Puritans 

from 

Viryinia, 



1643. 



XIX. 

In 1643, Parliament, dominated by Puritans, 
could not let the distant Maryland province rest in 
peace. It passed an ordinance making- the Earl of 
Warwick Governor in Chief and Lord High Ad- 
miral of all the plantations in America. This act 
contained covert allusions to papists, Spaniards, 
and governors recently appointed by the king. 
Baltimore met the rising tempest in a wa_v char- 
acteristic of him. If he could settle a portion of 
his province with Puritans they might serve to 
shield him from the storm. Besides, the Catholic 
emigration had not proved large, and his province 
needed inhabitants. He wrote to a Captain Gib- 
bons, of Boston, sending him a commission under 
the Maryland government, and offering " free lib- 
erty of religion and all other privileges " to such 
of the New England people as were willing to re- 
move to Maryland. There were those in New 
England in that day who longed for a more genial 
climate, but to settle under the authority of a pa- 
pist was to them much like pitching a tent on the 
confines of perdition. 

Though Puritans could not be induced to move 
from New England, it happened that the Puritans 
living in Virginia were persecuted in this same 
year by that stanch cavalier and retrograde church- 
man. Sir William Berkeley, who wanted his par- 
sons to read prayers, but did not like preaching 
ministers of any sort. Pie was new to his govern- 



TJte CatJiolic Mio^ration. 



253 



ment, and had brought over with him plenty of 
hostiHty to the party that had affronted his royal 
master in England. Virginia Puritans had no 
choice but to suffer or depart, and Maryland was 
convenient. They began soon after this to seek a 
refuge under the protection of a proprietary who 
was a papist and who practiced toleration — two 
things almost equally hateful to the Puritans. INIr. 
James, a Puritan minister, tarried in Maryland a 
short time, as early as 1643 ; he was probably the 
only Protestant minister that set foot on Maryland 
soil before 1650. But the Puritan was never easy 
unless he was uneasy, and he was sure to be un- 
easy within when there was none to molest from 
without. To take an oath of fidelity to a papist 
was to him swearing fealty to antichrist ; but so 
desirous was Baltimore of Puritan settlers that 
even the Maryland oath of fidelity was modified, 
and a saving clause was inserted for the ease of 
the Puritan conscience. The coming of Puritans 
who were in sympathy with the Parliament in 
England and who abhorred a tolerant papist, con- 
tributed something to the multifarious turmoils of 
the following years. 

XX. 

What we know of the petty civil wars of Mary- 
land is tedious and perplexing. The broils before 
1649 sprang from diverse sources, some of which 
we know, others we may easily conjecture. There 
v/as the old claim of Claiborne to jurisdiction over 



Chap. I. 



Maryland 
turmoils. 



254 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 24. 



The Act of 

1649. 



Kent Island ; there was a disposition on the part 
of some of the Marylanders to relieve the tedium 
of existence by taking a hand in the great struggle 
against roj'al authority which was rending Eng- 
land ; there was the tendency common in frontier 
communities to carry debates to a violent issue ; 
there was perhaps a natural proneness to insurrec- 
tion on the part of bond servants and men lately 
out of service ; and there was an innate hunger for 
spoil of any sort in the seamen of that age and in 
the rougher class on shore. But by 1648 the tem- 
pest had passed for the time ; order had been re- 
established ; the Catholic and the Puritan were liv- 
ing in peace like the lion and the lamb of Hebrew 
prophecy ; and the Catholic proprietary, always 
promptly bending before the storm, had delegated 
his authority to a Protestant governor who took 
the Parliament side. 

XXI. 

Before this epoch Marjdand toleration had been 
merely a practical fact. It had not been theoretic- 
ally stated ; it had not been a matter of legislation 
at all ; its extent and limitations were unknown. 
But now that this colonial home of Catholics was 
to be a land of Protestants, and particularly of 
Puritans, it was necessary to formulate the prin- 
ciple of toleration, the more, that Baltimore's own 
co-religionists were to be put under a Protestant 
governor. Governor and high officers of state 
were required to swear that they would molest on 



TJic CatJiolic Mif^ration. 



255 



account of religion no person professing to believe 
in Jesus Christ, " and in particular no Roman Cath- 
olic." By the mere march of events it had come 
to pass that in the state founded by Catholics as a 
cradle for the Roman Catholic religion, the Cath- 
olic was now compelled to secure as best he could 
the toleration of his religion at the hands of the 
heretic. Part of Baltimore's plan for this new set- 
tlement of affairs involved the sending over of a 
code of perpetual laws to be adopted by the Assem- 
bly. The proprietary gave orders that the gov- 
ernor should not assent to any of these laws if all 
were not passed ; but the Assembly of Maryland 
farmers was too cunning to be entrapped into pass- 
ing laws which it thought inconvenient and unjust. 
A humble letter was sent from the members to 
the lord proprietary complaining that they were 
" illeteratc " and " void of that Understanding 
and Comprehension " necessary to the discussion 
of such a code, and that in April they were too 
busy with their " necessary employm.ent in a 
Crop " to give attention to it. They selected 
certain acts out of the code which they passed, 
among which was the famous Act of Toleration of 
1649. That this was part of the code sent from 
England there can be no doubt ; the " illeteratc " 
colonists were not capable of framing it, and it 
bears the character-mark of the Baltimore policy 
throughout. Here is no philosophic theory of tol- 
eration, no far-reaching conclusion like that of 
Roger Williams, that the magistrate may not take 



Chap. I. 



256 



Coitrifugal Forces in Coloiy-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 25. 



Vicissi- 
tudes of 
toleration. 



cognizance of merely religious offences. Williams 
was a thinker, a doctrinary, too far in advance of 
his age to be the successful organizer of a new 
state. Baltimore, on the other hand, accepted a 
practical toleration as an expedient — he may even 
have come to believe in it as a theory by force of 
his own situation. But he was not primarily a 
thinker at all. Even here, where Baltimorean tol- 
eration reaches high tide, no philosophic congruity 
is sought. The Jew and the Unitarian who deny 
the divinity of Christ are to be put to death. 
Only so much toleration is granted as is needful 
to the occasion. And even this toleration is not 
put upon any other ground than public policy ; 
the forcing of conscience in religion " hath fre- 
quently fallen out to be of dangerous conse- 
quence " ; therefore this law is made "to preserve 
mutual love and amitv among^st the inhabitants." 
The provisions against such offences as blasphemy 
and Sabbath-breaking and religious disputes pre- 
cede those for toleration. Very politic is the ar- 
rangement by which reviling of God is made a 
capital offence, while reviling the Virgin Mary is 
adroitly associated with speeches against the " holy 
apostles or evangelists " as a sort of second-class 
blasphemy, a finable offence. 

And yet it was toleration, and the law was all 
the more influential as an example, perhaps, be- 
cause it was only practical and quite incongruous. 
It was eminently prudent and statesmanlike. That 
it was not perpetually effective was the fault not 



The CatJiolic Migration. 



257 



of Baltimore but of the times. Puritan ideas were 
rampant. The government of the proprietary was 
overthrown ; the Jesuits fled to the inhospitable 
Virginia, where they lived concealed in a low hut 
like a cistern or a tomb, not lamenting their phys- 
ical privations so much as the lack of wine which 
deprived them of the consolation of the sacrament. 
The new government of Maryland, five years after 
Baltimore's famous " act concerning Religion," 
passed a new act with the same title — an act 
brusque and curt, a law with its boots and spurs 
on. " That none profess and exercise the papist 
religion " is its rude forbidding. The tables are 
turned ; it is no longer the nonresident Jew and 
the hypothetical Unitarian who are excepted. But 
the wheels rolled swiftly once more, and in three 
years Cecilius, absolute lord and proprietary, was 
again master of Maryland, and the beneficent act 
of 1649 resumed its sway. It protected the Catho- 
lic element, which, though always rich and in- 
fluential, came to be in latter colonial times but 
about a twelfth of the population. Toleration also 
served to make Maryland an early dwelling place 
for abounding Quakers and others holding re- 
lio:ious views not relished in colonies less liberal. 



Chap. I. 



258 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note I, 
page 223. 



Note 2, 
page 224. 



Note 3, 
page 225, 



Note 4, 
page 225. 



Elucidations. 

" Voto a Dios que la Corte d'Inglatierra es como un libro de 
cavalleros andantes." Quoted by Chamberlain in Birch, i, 413. 
In view of the swift mutations of fortune among courtiers, Dudley 
Carleton the younger wrote on December 18, 1624, " He is hap- 
piest who has least to do at court " — a truth which Calvert prob- 
ably had come to appreciate by that time. 

" The third man who was thought to gain by the Spaniard 
was Secretary Calvert ; and as he was the only secretary em- 
ployed in the Spanish match, so undoubtedly he did what good 
offices he could therein for religion's sake, being infinitely ad- 
dicted to the Roman Catholic faith, having been converted there- 
unto by Count Gondomar and Count Arundel. . . . Now this 
man did protest to a friend of his own that he never got by the 
Spaniards so much as a pair of pockets ; which it should seem is 
a usual gift among them, being excellently perfumed, and may 
be valued at twenty nobles or ten pounds price." Goodman's 
Court of King James, i, 376, 377. 

Whitbourne gives these names. Those who believe that Cal- 
vert was already actuated by religious zeal, remind us that Glas- 
tonbury (by a curious legendary confusion of names) was also 
called Avalon, and that in the Christian legend Joseph of Arima- 
thea began at Glastonbury the planting of the Christian religion 
in Britain. See Anderson's Church of England in the Colonies, 
second edition, i, 325, 326. This interpretation of Calvert's in- 
tention in naming his colony was early given. British Museum, 
Sloane MSS. XXG. 3662, folio 24, date 1670. When Calvert's 
first colony was sent out the Scotch settlement in Newfound- 
land was of twelve years' standing, while the Bristol colony had 
been seated there five years. Calvert's enterprise seems to have 
been pushed with more energy and with a more liberal expendi- 
ture than its predecessors. Compare Whitbourne passim with 
the statement of Sir William Alexander in his Encouragement 
to Colonies, 1624, p. 25. 

Among the papers at Landsdowne House which I was per- 
mitted to examine by the kindness of Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice, 
there is an unpublished work by James Abercromby, written in 
1752. It discusses with acuteness the nature of the several 
colonial governments. I shall refer to it hereafter under the 



TJie Catholic Mio^ration. 



259 



title of Abercromby's Examination, Landsdowne House, 47. 
Abercromby was, so far as I know, the first to point out the ap- 
parently intentional ambiguity of the passages in the Maryland 
charter that have to do with religion. 

It is interesting that in 1622, the year preceding the division 
of New England by lot, three shares were laid off and no more. 
They were at the extreme north of the territory divided the next 
year, and were assigned respectively to the Duke of Lenox, the 
Earl of Arundel, and Sir George Calvert. A "grand patent" 
was then in preparation for a colony on the coast of Maine to be 
called Nova Albion. Calendar Colonial Documents, July 24, 
1622. It seems probable, from the charter of Avalon, that Cal- 
vert intended it to be a colony that should harbor Catholics, but 
on the other hand the first settlers were chiefly Protestants, with 
a clergyman of their own faith, and there seem to have been few 
Romanists or none in Avalon until the arrival of a company with 
the lord proprietary in 1627. 

Fuller's oft-quoted account of the circumstances of Calvert's 
resignation. Worthies, Nuttall's edition, iii, 417, 418, gives prob- 
ably the commonly received story, and shows that the religious 
motive was popularly accepted as the reason for his leaving 
office. Archbishop Abbot was better informed though less 
impartial. His letter is in the curious work entitled " The 
Negotiations of Sir Thomas Roe in his Embassy to the Ottoman 
Porte from the Year 1621 to 1628," etc., published in 1740. 
Abbot says : " Mr. secretary Calvert hath never looked merily 
since the prince his coming out of Spaine : it was thought hee 
was muche interested in the Spanishe affaires : a course was 
taken to ridde him of all imployments and negotiations. This 
made him discontented ; and, as the saying is, Desperatio facit 
monachutn, so hee apparently did turne papist, whiche hee now 
professeth, this being the third time that hee hath bene to blame 
that way. His Majesty to dismisse him, suffered him to resigne 
his Secretaries place to Sir Albertus Moreton, who payed him 
three thousand pounds for the same ; and the kinge hath made 
him baron of Baltimore in Ireland ; so hee is withdrawn from vs, 
and having bought a ship of 400 tuns, hee is going to New Eng- 
land, or Newfoundlande, where hee hath a colony." Page 372. 
The letters preserved among the state papers are the main 
authority, especially those addressed to Sir Dudley Carleton, who 
desired to buy Calvert's place. See, passim, the Calendar of 



Chap. I. 



Note 5, 
page 226. 



Note 6, 
page 228. 



26o 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 7, 
page 229. 



Domestic Papers for 1634 and 1625 to Februar)' 12th. The cir- 
cumstantial account given in the Salvetti correspondence, though 
cited as authority by Mr. Gardiner, has never been printed, for 
which reason it is here given in the original from the British 
Museum Additional MSS. 27962 C. : " II Signor Cavalier Calvert 
primo Segretario et Consigliero di Stato, credendosi, doppo la 
rottura de' trattati, che si haveva con Spagna, (che per comanda- 
mento di sua Maesti haveva lui solo maneggiati,) d'essere eclip- 
sato neir oppinione del Sigr. Principe et Signor Duca, et di non 
essere piu impiegato con quella confidenza, che solevano ricorse 
pochi giorni sono dal Signor Duca di Buchingam per fargli inten- 
dere la sua risoluuone, la quale era, che vedendo di non potere 
godere della buona grazia dell' Eccellenza sua nella medesima 
forma che godeva avanti della sua andata in Spagna era risoluto 
di rittrarsi dalla Corte, et di mettere in sua niano, come di pre- 
sente faceva, la sua carica, perche ne disponasse ovonque le 
piacesse con molte altre parole tutte piene di valore et mngna- 
nimita: soggiugnendoli di piu come dicono, che essendo risoluto 
per I'avvenire di vivere et morire Cattolicamenle, conosceva di 
non poterlo fare nel servizio dove era senza gelosia dello stato et 
pericolo del Parlamento. II Signor Duca ancorche non amasse 
questo Cavaliero, ne nessuno altro che ha hauto le mani nel pa- 
rentado di Spagna, con tutto cio vedendo un atto cosi honorato, 
gli rispose : che non potera negare che non gli fusse stato da 
non so che tempo in qua nemico ; ma che hora vedendo la fran- 
chezza et nobilta d'animo, col rispetto che gli haveva mostrato, 
I'abracciava per amico, per mostrargliene gli effeti, sempre che 
ne havesse occasione, con assicuratione de piu che operrebbe 
con sua Maesta gli fusse confermato le suoi pensioni, et di piu 
dato honorevole ricompensa per la sua carica di segretario. Et 
che quanto alia sua religione egli I'havrebbe protetto quanto 
fusse mai stato possibile," etc. Salvetti, Correspondence, iii, 
February' 6, i624-'25. 

The letter of the 2Sth February (O. S.) in the same volume 
gives an account of the formal resignation to the king, and states 
that the greater part of the money paid to Calvert was from his 
successor, and that it was paid dcnari coittanti, "cash down," 
and adds sympathetically that " this good lord will be able to 
live easily and quietly " hereafter. 

Calvert attributes his deception to interested letters. The 
principal motives to settle in Newfoundland may be seen by the 



TJie Catholic ATi^'ration. 



261 



reader who has patience enough to thread his way through the ^^^^- ^' 
jumble of mythology, allegory, political economy of a certain 
sort, verse in English and Latin, theology, satire, and an incredi- 
ble number of what-nots besides " for the generall and perpetual! 
good of Great Britain," found in Vaughan's Golden Fleece, pub- 
lished in 1626. The nearness of Newfoundland to Ireland and 
the comparative cheapness of transportation thither, but espe- 
cially the well-established value of its fisheries and the market 
they afforded for the produce of the colony, were the most plausi- 
ble reasons for settling a colony there. Probably there was a 
lurking purpose to turn the shore fishery into a monopoly such 
as was contemplated by projectors for the New England coast. 
The fact was insisted upon that part of Newfoundland was 
"equal in climate," or at least in latitude, to " Little Britain in 
France," or Brittany. Then, too, Newfoundland is an island, and 
Vaughan at least persuaded himself that " Banders should dwel 
in Bands." As some of the apostles were fishermen, " New- 
foundland the grand port of Fishing was alloted to Professors 
of the Gospell," Golden Fleece, Part Third, pp. 5 and 6 and 
passt'm. 

Lord Baltimore may have had the governorship of Virginia in Note 8, 
view. Cecilius, his son, sought to have himself made governor page 230. 
in 1637. Colonial Papers, ix, 45, Record Office. See an earlier 
communication on the same subject in Sainsbury, 246, under the 
date of February 25, 1637. It is almost the only petition of the 
second Lord Baltimore that was not granted. See also section 
xvii of the present chapter, and note 21 below. 



\JC 



xV 



I have ventured to conjecture so much on evidence not 
complete. Father White, who was cordially entertained by the 
Governor of St. Kitts in 1634, speaks of the people of Montser- 
rat as " pulsos ab anglis Virginise ob fidei Catholicse profes- 
sionem." White's choice of words does not necessarily imply, I 
suppose, an actual banishment from Virginia, but at least a re- 
fusal of permission to come. Neither Edwards nor Oldmixon 
men'.ion this fact ; but as White visited St. Kitts only two years 
after the settlement at Montserrat, which was made immediately 
from St. Kitts (according to Edwards) and was subject to the 
same governor, his information was doubtless correct. There 
seems to have been another project to plant Catholics in Vir- 
ginia about this time, unless, as is rather probable, we meet 
the same plan in another form. Sir Pierce Crosby offered to 



Note 9, 
page 231, 



202 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note lo, 
page 235. 



Note II, 
page 235. 



plant ten companies " of the Irish Regiment into a fruitful part 
of America not yet inhabited." To make the proposal acceptable, 
it was stated, somewhat diplomatically perhaps, that the major 
part of the officers and many of the soldiers were Protestants. 
Sainsbury's Calendar, p. 95, where the conjectural date is 1628. 

The translation quoted is that published by Cecilius Calvert 
in the Relation of 1635. The original reads : " Unacum licencia 
et facultate Ecclesias Capellas et Oratoria in locis infra premissa 
congruis et idoneis Extruendi et fundandi eaque dedicari et sacrari 
juxta leges Ecclesiasticas regni nostri Anglic facendas." Mary- 
land Archives. 

Sir Edward Northey, Attorney-General of England in the 
following century, gave this decision: "As to the said clause in 
the grant of the province of Maryland, I am of opinion the same 
doth not give him power to do anything contrary to the ecclesi- 
astical laws of England." This is as ingeniously ambiguous as 
the clause itself. The attorneys-general and solicitors-general 
during the eighteenth century set themselves to the task of sub- 
ordinating colonial government to parliamentary authority by a 
series of opinions in which they make rather than explain law. 
In the present instance Northey was more modest than usual, for 
he reaches a purely negative and impotent conclusion, which 
Neill turns into a positive one in his text. Founders of Mary- 
land, 99. There is a collection of opinions on colonial subjects 
rendered by the attorneys and solicitors-general in the first half 
of the eighteenth century, in a volume at Landsdowne House 
which I have examined. This collection was made, or at least 
furnished, for the use of Lord Shelburne. Before Northey's 
opinion was given the English Parliament had assumed power to 
override some provisions of the Maryland charter, as is pointed 
out in Abercromby's Examination, MS. at Landsdowne House, 
47. How slowly the Church of England grew in the colony may 
be inferred from the statement made in 1677, that four clergymen 
have plantations and settled " beings " of their own — a phrase 
sufficiently obscure. Others were sustained by voluntary contri- 
butions. Colonial Papers, No. 49, Record Office, folios 54, 55. 
This is Baltimore's reply to the paper at folio 56, the order of 
which is evidently reversed. The population of the province, 
it is stated, was composed at that time chiefly of dissenters 
of various sects. Catholics and Anglicans being the smallest 
bodies. 



The CatJiolic ]\Iio;ration. 



263 



As early as 1752 it was remarked that the Maryland charter 
contained " the most extensive power of any charter in Brit- 
ish America." Abercromby's Examination, MS., Landsdowne 
House. In Collier's Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain, vol. 
ix, is the writ of Edward HI, A. D. 1327, by which the regalities 
of the bishopric of Durham are confirmed after a trial in parlia- 
ment. 

Cecilius, Lord Baltimore, wrote to Strafford, 10 January, 
1633-34, that he had sent " a hopeful colony into Maryland with 
a fair and probable Expectation of Success, however without 
Danger of any great prejudice unto myself, in Respect that many 
others are joined with me in the Adventure " — that is, in the finan- 
cial risk. Strafford Papers, i, 179. Twenty years later Crom- 
well writes to Bennet, Governor of Virginia, " We have therefore 
at the request of Lord Baltimore and of divers other persons of 
quality here who are engaged in great adventures in his interest," 
etc. Thurloe, i, 724. A tradition of this co-operation may have 
remained in Maryland a century later, for in 1755 or 1756 there 
was presented to the Lord Baltimore of that day, who was a 
Protestant, a petition from Roman Catholic residents of Mary- 
land in which this assertion occurs : " The money and persons of 
this persuasion contributed chiefly to the settling and peopling of 
this colony." British Museum MS. 15,489. 

The statement of Father Henry More, in 1642, that " in lead- 
ing the colony to Maryland by far the greater number were here- 
tics," is not conclusive, though it is relied on by General Bradley 
T. Johnson and others. More was Provincial of the Jesuits in 
England, and he is no doubt repeating loosely the information 
contained in Father White's letter of the year before, which says, 
" Whereas three parts of the people in four at least are heretics " 
— a statement true, no doubt, in 1641, when the Kent Islanders 
and newcomers were counted, but not true, probably, of the com- 
pany of 1634, as Bancroft seems to say. 

The original document is in the Stoneyhurst MSS., Anglia, 
vol. iv. It is reprinted in full in General Bradley T. Johnson's 
" The Foundation of Maryland." It tends to show that the emi- 
gration of many recusants was confidently expected. 

" Nubes, terrificum in morem excresentes, terrori erant intu- 
entibus antequam discinderentur : et opinionem faciebant pro- 
diisse adversiim nos in aciem, omnes spiritus tempestatum male- 
ficas, et malos genios omnes Marylandise," Relatio Itineris, 15. 



Chap. I. 

Note 12, 
page 236. 



Note 13, 
page 240. 



Note 14, 
page 242. 



Note 15, 
page 242. 



Note 16, 
page 243. 



264 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 

Note 17, 
page 247, 



Note iS, 
page 248. 



Note 19, 
page 248. 



Note 20, 
page 249. 



Note 31, 
page 2jO. 



See passim. Letters of Missionaries. A letter of Copley, the 
Jesuit, to Lord Baltimore, in Calvert Papers, p. 165, implies the 
possibility of Catholic incumbents of Maryland parishes. He is 
complaining of the law of the Assembly of 1638 relating to glebe 
land : " In euery Manner 100 acres must be laid out for Gleabe 
lande, if then the intention to bind them to be pastors who en- 
joy it, we must either by retaining so much euen of our owne 
land undertake the office of pastors or lesse euen in our owne 
Mannor maintaine pastors, both which to us would be uery In- 
conuenient." 

Letters of Missionaries, p. ']']. " The Catholics who live in 
the colony are not inferior in piety to those who live in other 
countries ; but in urbanity of manners, according to the judg- 
ment of those who have visited the other colonies, are considered 
far superior to them." More than a hundred years later the 
Catholics retained a superiority, according to Updike's Appendix 
to McSparran, 1752 : "The Catholics, having the start in point 
of time of the after settlers, are also to this day ahead of them 
in wealth and substance ; by which means the first and best fami- 
lies are for the most part still of the Roman communion," p. 492, 

The act passed in 1704 was renewed in 171 5 and still in force 
in 1749. I cite from Ogle's Account of Maryland, of the latter 
date, a manuscript at Landsdowne House, numbered 45, folio 
199. In No. 61 at Landsdowne House is a decision of the At- 
torney-General in England in 1605 that Jesuits may be expelled 
from Maryland by order of the queen if aliens, but not if they are 
subjects. The various eighteenth-century enactments against 
Catholics will be found in Bacon's Laws of Maryland, passim. 
MS. 15,489, British Museum, cites some of these severe laws and 
the proceedings taken under them. Strong petitions against 
these measures were signed by Charles Carroll and others. 

Gabriel Hawley, Robert Evelin, and Jerome Hawley, appointed 
to places in Virginia, appear to have been Catholics and partisans 
of Baltimore. Aspinwall Papers, i, page loi, note. 

Baltimore's letter bears date February 25, 1637, and is in the 
Record Office, Colonial Papers, xiv, No. 42. The memorial ap- 
parently sent with it is No. 49 in the same volume. Baltimore 
proposes to reward Windebank for his assistance, and he sets 
down the very manner in which the secretary is to approach the 
king with a diplomatic falsehood. Both the letter and memorial 



TJie Catholic Mis'raiion. 



265 



are printed in Maryland Archives, Council Proceedings, pp. 
41. 42. 

The act was one of those that for some reason ol expediency 
was never read a third time, but was condensed into what would 
now be called an omnibus bill. The act is given in Bacon's 
Laws, and is compared by Bozman with Magna Charta. Boz- 
man regards this law of 1639 as an attempt to establish the 
Roman Catholic religion. 

A copy of the ordinance as printed separately at the time is 
in the Lenox Library. It is reprinted in Churchill's Voyages, 
viii, "jjS. 

It is extremely curious that, in the letters of one of the Jesuits 
reporting the attack upon them in 1645, he should have used an 
expressive word hitherto supposed to be very modern and Amer- 
ican. He says that the assault was made " by a party of' rowdies ' 
or marauders." From the way in which the sentence is printed 
in the Records of the Society of Jesus, iii, 387, I suppose that in 
the original manuscript the English word " rowdies " is given 
and explained by a Latin equivalent. 

Charles, the third Lord Baltimore, writes in defense of the 
Maryland policy of toleration under date of March 26, 1678: 
" That at the first planteing of this Provynce of my ffather — 
Albeit he had an absolute Liberty given to him and his heires 
to carry thither any Persons out of any the Dominions that be- 
longed to the Crown of England that should be found Wylling 
to goe thither, yett when he comes to make use of this Liberty 
He found very few who were inclyned to goe and seat themselves 
in those parts But such as for some Reasons or other could not 
Lyve with ease in other places. And of these a great parte were 
such as could not conforme in all particulars to the severall Lawes 
of England relateing to Religion. Many there were of this sort of 
people who declared their Wyllingness to goe and Plant them- 
selves In this Provynce soe as they might have a generall toleracon 
settled there by a Lawe by which all of all sorts that professed 
Christianity in Generall might be at liberty to worship God in 
such manner as was most agreeable with their respective Judg- 
ments and Consciences without being Subject to any Penaltyes 
whatever for their soe doing." Colonial Papers, vol. xlix, Rec- 
ord Office. Compare Leah and Rachel, p. 23, where the author 
also implies that the Act of Toleration was a concession to Puri- 
tan demands. 



Ch.\p. I. 



Note 22, 
page 251. 



Note 23, 
page 252. 

Note 24, 
page 254. 



Note 25, 
page 256. 



^ 



CHAPTER THE SECOND. 

THE PROPHET OF RELIGIOUS FREEDOM. 



Book III. 

Centrifu- 
gal forces 
in Massa- 
chusetts. 



I. 

The centrifugal force of religious differences 
acted with disastrous results in Maryland, because 
the Catholic party, which had always a control- 
ling negative there through the proprietary, was 
in the minority. The Massachusetts people, on 
the other hand, were fairly homogeneous in re- 
ligious opinion, and their government was admira- 
bly compacted. In Massachusetts religious senti- 
ment was a powerful centripetal force. INIagistrates 
and ministers were nicely poised, and each order 
relied upon the other to maintain existing condi- 
tions. If the magistrates v/ere perplexed or were 
seriously opposed, the elders were called in to ad- 
vise or to lend a powerful ecclesiastical sanction to 
the rulers. When any disturbance of church order 
was threatened, the magistrates came to the front 
and supported the clergy with the sharp smiting 
of the secular arm. In the magistracy and in the 
ranks of the clergy were men of unusual prudence 
and ability. If the little Puritan commonwealth 
seemed a frail canoe at first, it was navigated — con- 
sidering its smallness one might rather say it was 

paddled — most expertly. But in Massachusetts, as 

266 



The PropJiet of Religions Freedom. 



267 



well as in Maryland, religious opinion was the main 
source of disturbance. The all-pervading ferment 
of the time could not be arrested, and more than 
once it produced explosion. Now one and now 
another prophet of novelty or prophet of retro- 
gression arose to be dealt with for religious errors ; 
there were divergences from the strait path of 
Puritanism in the direction of a return to Church 
of England usage, divergences in the direction of 
extreme Separatism, in the direction of the ever- 
dreaded " Anabaptism," in the direction of Arian- 
ism, and of so-called Antinomianism. In the case 
of the Antinomians, the new movement was able to 
shelter itself under the authority of the younger 
Vane, then governor, and for a while under the 
apparent sanction of the powerful Cotton. But no 
other religious disturbance was ever allowed to 
gather head enough to become dangerous to the 
peace and unity of the little state. Dislike as we may 
the principles on which uniformity was enforced, 
we must admire the forehanded statesmanship of 
the Massachusetts leaders in strangling religious 
disturbances at birth, as Pharaoh's midvvives did 
infant Hebrews. 

II. 

One of the most formidable of all those who 
ventured to assail the compact phalanx presented 
by the secular and religious authorities of Massa- 
chusetts was Roger Williams. Williams was the 
son of a merchant tailor of London. He mani- 



Chap, II. 



Early life 
of Roger 
Williams. 

N. Eng. 
Hist., Gen. 
Reg., July, 



268 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Indorss- 
ment of 
Mrs. Sad- 
leir on 
Williams's 
letter, 
transcript, 
Lenox Li- 
brary ; also 
in Narra- 
gansatt 
Club, 
Pub. VL 



Note I. 



fested in boyhood that quickness of apprehension 
which made him successful in acquiring languages 
later in life. Before he was fifteen the precocious 
lad was employed in the Star Chamber in taking 
notes of sermons and addresses in shorthand, and 
his skill excited the surprise and admiration of Sir 
Edward Coke. Coke had found time, in the midst 
of a tempestuous public career and the arduous 
private studies that brought him permanent re- 
nown, to defend the legacy which founded the 
new Sutton's Hospital, later known as the Charter- 
House School. Of this school he was one of the 
governors, and he appointed young Roger Wil- 
liams to a scholarship there, Williams being the 
second pupil that ever gained admission to that 
nursery of famous men. His natural inclination 
to industry in his studies was quickened by the 
example and encouragement of Coke, who was wont 
to say that he who would harrow what Roger Wil- 
liams had sown must rise early. From the Charter 
House Williams went to Pembroke College, Cam- 
bridge. He early manifested sincere piety and a 
tendency to go to extremes in his Puritan scruples. 
Even in his father's house he had begun to taste 
the bitterness of persecution. His eager temper 
transformed his convictions into downright pas- 
sions ; his integrity was an aggressive force, and 
there was a precipitation in his decisions and ac- 
tions that was trying to his friends. From an early 
period he showed a conscience intolerant of pru- 
dent compromises. Puritanism had contrived to 



TJie PropJict of Religious Fi'ccdom. 



269 



exist and to ^xow to formidable strength witiiin 
the church by means of such compromises. I looker 
and Cotton, two of the greatest luminaries of that 
party and afterward the lights that lightened New 
England, one day urged on the impetuous Williams 
the propriety of temporarily conforming in the use 
of the common prayer. By conceding so much to 
the judgment of his revered elders, Williams would 
have removed the only obstacle to his advance- 
ment, for preferment was offered to the clever and 
exemplary prott'gc of Coke in the universities, in 
the city, in the country, and at court. But neither 
interest nor example could sway the impractical 
young minister. He took refuge, like other ex- 
treme Puritans, in a private chaplaincy, and re- 
fused all compromise, in order, as he afterward 
declared, to keep his "soul undefiled in this 
point and not to act with a doubting conscience." 
Most men feel bound to obey conscience only 
where it clearly commands or forbids ; good men 
may act on the balance of probabilities where there 
is doubt ; but this young man would not do any- 
thing concerning which his moral judgment felt 
the slightest halting. Here is the key to his whole 
career; his strength lay in his aspiration for a soul 
undefiled ; his weakness, in that he was ever a vic- 
tim to the pampered conscience of an ultraist. 
Property of some thousands of pounds, that might 
have been his had he been willing to make oath in 
the form required in chancery, he renounced to 
his scruples. It certainly seemed rash in a young 



CllAl'. II. 



Note 3. 



2/0 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Flight of 
Williams 
from Eng- 
land. 



Williams's 
letter to 
Mrs. Sad- 
leir, as 
above. 



Arrival in 
New Eng- 
land. 



Note 3. 



man just setting out in life, with a young wife to 
care for, to indulge in such extravagant luxury of 
scruple. 

III. 

Laud succeeded in hunting the non-conforming 
Puritans from their lectureships and chaplaincies. 
It became with Williams no longer a question of 
refusing preferments on both hands with lavish 
self-denial, but of escaping the harsh penalties re- 
served for such as he by the Courts of High Com- 
mission and the Star Chamber. There was nothing 
left but to betake himself to New England for 
safety. He fled hurriedly across country on horse- 
back, feeling it " as bitter as death " that he dared 
not even say farewell to his great patron Sir Ed- 
ward Coke, who detested schism. 

Here, as in after life, the supreme hardship he 
suffered was not mere exile, but that exile of the 
spirit which an affectionate man feels when he is 
excommunicate of those he loves. His escape by 
sea was probably the more difficult because he was 
unwilling to "swallow down" the oath exacted of 
those who emigrated. But he succeeded in sailing 
with his young wife, and in 163 1 this undefiled soul, 
this dauntless and troublesome extremist, landed in 
New England. He was invited to become one of 
the ministers of the Boston church. But Williams 
was conscientiously a Separatist, and he refused to 
enter into communion with the Boston congrega- 
tion because of its position with reference to the 
church in Ensfland. 



The Prophet of Rcligio7is Freedom. 



271 



Tliis protest by withdrawal of communion was 
a fundamental principle of Separatism. It was not, 
as it appears on the surface, a manifestation of un- 
charitableness toward persons, but a solemn protest 
by act in favor of a principle. Never was any 
man more forgiving, long-suffering, and charitable 
toward opponents than Williams, but never was a 
man less inclined to yield a single jot in the direc- 
tion of compromise where his convictions were in- 
volved, whatever might be the evils sure to result 
from his refusal. 

IV. 

Williams repaired first to Salem, the north 
pole of Puritanism, where the pioneer church of 
Massachusetts had a more Separatist tone than 
any other. In the phrase of the time, no other 
churches in the world were so "pure " as the New 
England churches, and Salem was accounted the 
" purest " church in New England. Its surviving 
minister, Skelton, and its principal layman, Ende- 
cott, both tended to extreme Congregationalism ; 
but the General Court of the colony protested 
against the selection of Williams to be one of the 
ministers of the Salem church. Skelton's Separa- 
tist tendencies, Endecott's impetuous radicalism, 
and Salem's jealous rivalry with the younger town 
of Boston, Vv^ere already sources of anxiety to the 
rulers. The addition of Williams to these explo- 
sive forces was alarming. Williams's ecclesiastical 
ideals were not those which the leaders of the 



Chap. II. 



Note 4. 



Williams 
at Salem. 



272 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Win- 
throp's 
Journal, i, 
63, 12th 
April, 1631. 



Note 5. 



Williams 
at Plym- 
outh. 



colony had devoted their lives and fortunes to es- 
tablish. Had this young radical been less consci- 
entious, less courageous, less engagingly good and 
admirable, there would not have been so much 
reason to fear him. A letter was written to Ende- 
cott protesting against Williams's ordination, be- 
cause he had refused communion with the church 
at Boston, and because he denied the power of the 
magistrate to enforce duties of the first table — that 
is, duties of religion. Here at the very outset of 
his American life we find that Williams had already 
embraced the broad principle that involved the 
separation of church and state and the most com- 
plete religious freedom, and had characteristically 
pushed this principle to its logical result some 
centuries in advance of the practice of his age. 
The protest of the court prevented his ordination. 
He yielded to the opposition and soon after re- 
moved to Plymouth, where the people were Sepa- 
ratists, modified by the conservative teachings of 
John Robinson, somewhat modified also by the 
responsibility of founding a new state, and per- 
haps by association with Puritans of the neighbor- 
ing colony. 

At Plymouth the young idealist " prophesied " 
in his turn, but did not take office in the church, 
which already had a pastor in Ralph Smith, the 
Separatist, who had been suffered to come over in 
a Massachusetts ship only on his giving a promise 
not to preach in that jurisdiction without leave. 
The congregation at Plj-mouth was poor, and 



The Prophet of Religious Freedom. 



273 



Roger Williams mainly supported himself by hard 
toil "at the hoe and the oar" — that is, perhaps, in 
farming and fishing. His body seems to have been 
vigorous, and no physical fatigue abated anything 
of his mental activity. The Pilgrims had passed 
more than twelve years in Holland, and almost 
every adult in Plymouth must have known Dutch. 
Those of Roger Williams's own age, who were 
children when they migrated to Leyden and men 
when they left, probably spoke it as well as they 
did their mother tongue. The Plymouth people, 
indeed, were styled " mungrell Dutch "a quarter 
of a century later. It is probable that Williams, 
with his usual eagerness to acquire knowledge, 
now added Dutch to his stock of languages ; it is 
certain that he afterward taught Dutch to John 
Milton. But he was still more intent on learning 
the language of the natives, that he might do them 
good. He resolved not to accept office as pastor 
or teacher, but to give himself to work among 
the Indians. Perhaps his tendency to individual- 
ism made this prospect pleasing to him. He may 
have begun already to realize in a half-conscious 
way that there was scant room in any organization 
for such as he. The learning of the Indian lan- 
guage was an arduous toil in more ways than one. 
" God was pleased to give me a painful patient 
spirit," wrote Williams long after, " to lodge with 
them in their filthy, smoky holes to gain their 
tongue." He afterward wrote an excellent treatise 

on the dialect of the New England Indians. 
19 



Chap. II. 



Maverick's 
Descrip- 
tion of 
New Eng- 
land, 25. 



Williams 
to Win- 
throp, 
1632. 



274 



Centrifugal Forces in Coiony-Planiiiig. 



Book III. 

Writes 
against 
the royal 
patents. 



Bradford, 
310- 



Knowles's 
Life of 
Williams, 
53- 



At Plymouth Williams spoke, as he had at 
Salem, without restraint from any motive of expe- 
diency or even of propriety. Separatist Plymouth, 
whose days of advance were over, was a little dis- 
turbed by his speech. In his own sweet, reckless 
way he sometimes sharply rebuked even the re- 
vered Bradford when he thought him at fault. 
And in the interest of the aborigines and of justice 
Williams laid before Governor Bradford a manu- 
script treatise which argued that the king had no 
right to give away, as he had assumed to do in his 
grants and charters, the lands of the Indians merely 
because he was a Christian and they heathen. 
That it was right to wrong a man because he was 
not orthodox in belief could find no place in the 
thoughts of one whose conscience was wholly in- 
capable of sophistication. Bradford accepted can- 
didly the rebukes of Williams and loved him for 
his " many precious parts." But as governor of a 
feeble colony he was disturbed by Williams's 
course. In spirituality, unselfish fearlessness, and 
a bold pushing of Separatist principles to their 
ultimate logical results, Roger Williams reminded 
the Pilgrims of the amiable pastor of the Separatist 
church in Amsterdam whose change step by step 
to " Anabaptism," the great bugbear of theology 
in that time, had been a tragedy and a scandal to 
the Separatists of Leyden. Elder Brewster feared 
that Williams would run the same course. Wil- 
liams wished to return to Salem, where he might 
still devote himself to the neighboring Indians, and 



lOoI. 




TJie PropJiet of Religious Freedom. 



275 



assist Skelton, now declining in health. Brewster 
persuaded the Plymouth church to give him a 
letter of dismissal. The leading Pilgrims felt 
bound to send " some caution " to the Salem 
church regarding the extreme tendencies of Wil- 
liams. On the other hand, some of the Plymouth 
people were so captivated by his teachings and 
his personal character that they removed with 
him. This following of an approved minister was 
common among Puritans ; an acceptable preacher 
was of as much value to a town as good meadows, 
broad pastures, and pure water. 



To understand the brief career of Williams at 
Salem and its catastrophe, we must recall the 
character of colonial life in Massachusetts at the 
time. There were already sixteen settlements or 
" towns " on the shores of Massachusetts Bay, with 
an indefinite stretch of gloomy wilderness for back- 
ground, the dwelling place of countless savages 
and wild beasts. The population of all the settle- 
ments may have summed up five thousand people 
— enough to have made one prosperous village. 
The inhabitants of the various towns of the bay 
were from different parts of England ; their dress 
and dialect were diverse, and their Puritanism was 
of various complexions. The town system, at first 
a reproduction on new soil of the township field 
communes that had subsisted in parts of England 
from ages bej^ond the fountain heads of tradition, 



Chap. II. 

Williams 
returns to 
Salem. 



The town 
system. 



2'j6 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 6. 



Life in the 
Massachu- 
setts set- 
tlements. 

1630 to 
1640. 



gave some play to local peculiarities and preju- 
dices. There is evidence that the central govern- 
ment relieved itself from strain by means of this 
rural borough system. The ancient town system 
in turn appears to have taken on a new youth ; it 
was perhaps modified and developed by the local 
diversity of the people, and it lent to Massachu- 
setts, at first, something of the elasticity of a fed- 
eral government. 

This community of scattered communes was 
cut off from frequent intercourse with the world, 
for the sea was far wider and more to be feared in 
that day of small ships and imperfect navigation 
than it is now. The noise of the English contro- 
versies in which the settlers had once borne a part 
reached them at long intervals, like news from an- 
other planet. But most of the time these lonesome 
settlements had no interest greater than the petty 
news and gossip of little forest hamlets. The vis- 
itor who came afoot along Indian trails, or by 
water, paddling in a canoe, to Boston on lecture 
day, might bring some news of sickness, accident, 
or death. Sometimes the traveling story was ex- 
citing, as that wolves had slaughtered the cattle 
at a certain place, while yet cattle were few and 
precious. Or still more distressing intelligence 
came that the ruling elder of the church at Water- 
town had taken the High-church position that 
Roman churches were Christian churches, or that 
democratic views had been advanced by Eliot of 
Roxbury. A new and far-fetched prophetical ex- 



TJlc Prophet of Religions Freedom. 



277 



planation of a passage in the Book of Canticles, 
and a tale of boatmen wrecked in some wintry 
tempest, might divide the attention of the people. 
Stories of boats capsized, of boatmen cast on islands 
where there was neither shelter nor food, of boats 
driven far to sea and heard of no more, were sta- 
ples of excitement in these half-aquatic towns ; and 
if the inmates of a doomed boat had been particu- 
larly profane, these events were accounted edify- 
ing — divine judgments on the ungodly. When the 
governor wandered once and lost himself in the 
forest, passing the night in a deserted wigwam, 
there was a sensation of a half-public character. 
That a snake and a mouse had engaged in a battle, 
and that the puny mouse had triumphed at last, 
was in one budget of traveling news that came to 
Boston. To this event an ominous significance 
was given by John Wilson, pastor of the Boston 
church, maker of anagrams, solemn utterer of 
rhyming prophecies which were sometimes ful- 
filled, and general theological putterer. Wilson 
made the snake represent the devil, according to 
all sound precedents ; the mouse was the feeble 
church in the wilderness, to which God would 
give the victory over Satan. Thus enhanced by 
an instructive interpretation from the prophet and 
seer of the colony, the story no doubt took up its 
travels once more, and now with its hopeful exe- 
gesis on its back. The Massachusetts mouse was 
an auspicious creature ; it is recorded by the gov- 
ernor, and it was no doubt told along the coast. 



Chap. II. 



2/8 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Self-con- 
sciousness 
of the 
Massachu- 
setts com- 
munity. 



Note 7. 



that one got into a library and committed depre- 
dations on a book of common prayer only, nibbling 
every leaf of the liturgy, while it reverently spared 
a Greek Testament and a Psalter in the same 
covers. 

In a petty state with a range of intellectual in- 
terests so narrow, the conflict between Williams 
and the General Court took place. 

VI. 

It was a community that believed in its own 
divine mission. It traced the existence of its set- 
tlements to the very hand of God — the God who 
led Israel out of Egypt. The New England col- 
onists never forgot that they were a chosen peo- 
ple. Upon other American settlers — the Dutch 
in New Netherland, the Virginia churchmen, the 
newly landed INIarylandcrs, with their admixture 
of papists — thc}^ looked with condescension if not 
with contempt, accounting them the Egyptians of 
the New World. The settlers on the Bay of 
Massachusetts were certain that their providen- 
tial exodus was one of the capital events in human 
history ; that it had been predesigned from eter- 
nity to plant here, in a virgin world, the only true 
form of church government and to cherish a church 
that should be a model to the Old World in turn, 
and a kind of foreshadowing of the new heaven 
and the new earth. Some dreamed that the sec- 
ond coming of Christ would take place among the 
rocky woodlands of New England. The theocrat- 



TJie Prophet of Religious Freedom. 



279 



ical government was thought to be the one most 
pleasing to God, and a solemn obligation was felt 
to import into this new theocracy the harsh Ori- 
ental intolerance which had marked that fierce 
struggle in which the Jewish tribes finally shook 
off image worship. 

The apostle of theocracy who arrived soon 
after Williams's return to Salem was John Cotton, 
a Puritan leader in England, in whom devoutness 
was combined with extreme discretion, a dominant 
will with a diplomatic prudence and a temper never 
rufilcd. Cotton's ingenious refinements made him 
a valuable apologist in an age of polemics, but they 
often served to becloud his vision of truth and 
right. He was prone to see himself as he posed, in 
the character of a protagonist of truth. He gave 
wise advice to the Massachusetts Puritans at their 
departure from England. When, a few years 
later, Laud's penetrating vigilance and relentless 
thoroughness made even Cotton's well-balanced 
course of mild non-conformity impossible, he fled 
from his parish of Boston, in Lincolnshire, to Lon- 
don, and escaped in 1633 with difficulty to the new 
Boston in New England. As John Cotton had 
been the shining candle of Puritanism in England, 
his arrival in America was hailed with joy, and 
from the time of his settlement in the little capital 
his was the hand that shaped ecclesiastical institu- 
tions in New England, and he did much also to 
mold the yet plastic state. Though he usually 
avoided the appearance of personal antagonism, 



Chap. II. 



John 
Cotton, 



Note 8. 



28o 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting, 



Book III. 



Salem 
refractory. 



Collision 
inevitable. 



every formidable rival he had left INIassachusetts 
early. Williams, Hooker, Davenport, and Hugh 
Peter all found homes beyond the bounds of the 
colony. There can not be two queen bees in one 
hive, nor can there well be more than one mas- 
ter mind in the ecclesiastical order of a petty 
theocratic state. It was the paradox of colonial 
religious organization that the Episcopal colonies 
had parishes almost independent of all supervision, 
while the New England Congregationalists were, 
from the arrival of Cotton, subject to the domi- 
nance of ministers who virtually attained to the 
authority of bishops. 

VII. 

Salem, the oldest town of the commonwealth, 
was the most ready to pursue an independent 
course and it was attached to Williams, whose abil- 
ity attracted new settlers and who maintained a 
position of independence toward Cotton and the 
authorities at Boston. To subdue the refractory 
Salem was no doubt one of the secondary purposes 
of the proceedings against Williams. There seems 
to have been no personal animosity toward Wil- 
liams himself; his amiable character and his never- 
doubted sincerity w^ere main obstacles to his pun- 
ishment. 

The return of Roger Williams to such a place 
as Salem was naturally a matter of alarm to the 
ministers and magistrates of Massachusetts. Col- 
lision was not a matter of choice on either side. 



TJie Prophet of Religious Freedom. 



281 



The catastrophe was like one that comes from the 
irresistible action of physical forces. In a colony 
planted at great cost to maintain one chosen form 
of worship and subordinating all the powers of 
government to this purpose, a preacher who as- 
serted the necessity for a complete separation of 
religion and government in the interest of soul lib- 
erty had no place. His ideal was higher than the 
prevailing one, but that age could not possibly rise 
to it. 

VIII. 

Williams was yet only a private member of the 
church in Salem, but in the illness of the pastor he 
" exercised by way of prophecy " — that is, preached 
without holding office. An alarming report was 
soon in circulation that he had written a book 
against the king's patent, the foundation of the 
colonial authority. This treatise, we have said, 
was written in Plymouth for the benefit of Gov- 
ernor Bradford. Like many of the manuscript 
books that have come down to us, it appears to 
have been a small quarto, and, if it resembled other 
books of the sort, it was neatly stitched and per- 
haps even bound by its author in the favorite pig- 
skin of the time. Williams sent his book promptly 
to be examined. Some of the " most judicious 
ministers much condemned Mr. Williams's error 
and presumption," and an order was made that he 
" should be convented at the next court." In the 
charges no fault was found with the main thesis of 



Chap. II. 



The book 
against 
the patent. 



Note 9. 



282 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



the book, that the king could not claim and give 
away the lands of the Indians ; but it was thought 
that there were disloyal reflections cast upon both 
James and Charles — at least those eager to con- 
demn construed the obscure and " implicative 
phrases " of Williams in that sense — and these sup- 
posed reflections were the subject of the charges. 
Williams wrote a submissive letter, and offered his 
book, or any part of it, to be burned after the man- 
ner of that time. A month later, when the gov- 
ernor and council met, the whole aspect of the 
affair had changed. Cotton and Wilson, the teacher 
and the pastor of the Boston church, certified, after 
examination of Williams's quarto, that " they found 
the matters not so evil as at first they seemed." 
It was decided to let Williams off easily. There 
are some things unexplained about the affair; the 
eagerness of the "judicious ministers" and court 
to condemn without due examination, the failure 
even to specify the objectionable passages at last, 
and the unwonted docility of Williams — all leave 
one to infer that there was more in this transaction 
than appears. Laud and his associates were mov- 
ing to have the Massachusetts charter vacated, and 
it may have seemed imprudent for the magistrates 
to found their authorit}'' on a base so liable to dis- 
appear. If the charter had been successfull}' called 
in, Williams's ground of the sufficiency of the 
Indian title to lands might have proved useful as a 
last resort. Williams asserted, long afterward, that 
before his troubles besran he had drafted a letter 



The PropJiet of Religious Freedom. 



283 



addressed to the king, " not without the approbation 
of some of the chiefs of New England," whose con- 
sciences were also " tender on this point before 
God." This letter humbly acknowledged "the evil 
of that part of the patent which relates " to the gift 
of lands. Had the letter been sent to its destina- 
tion it would have cut a curious figure among the 
worldly-minded state papers of the time. 

It is probable that most of the land of the col- 
ony had been secured from the natives by purchase 
or by treaty of some sort ; at least the Indians 
were content, and the little quarto had at that time 
no practical bearing whatever, but that did not 
matter to Williams. The more abstract a ques- 
tion of right and wrong, the more he relished a 
discussion of it. It was of a piece with his ex- 
quisite Separatism, a mere standing up in the face 
of heaven and earth for an abstract principle. His 
purpose was not to right a specific and concrete 
wrong, for there had been none, but to assert as a 
broad principle of everlasting application that a 
Christian king may not dispose of the land owned 
by heathens merely because of his Christianity. 
Williams was not a judge or a lawgiver; he was 
a poet in morals, enamored of perfection, and keep- 
ing his conscience purer than Galahad's, 

IX. 

It was in the winter of 1633-34 that the book 
about the patent was called in question. Skelton, 
pastor of Salem, died in the following August, 



Chap. II. 



Reply to 
Cotton, 
276, 277. 



An ab- 
stract 
principle. 



The alarm. 



284 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



and the Salem people, in spite of an injunction 
from the magistrates, made Williams their teacher 
in his stead. The country was now full of alarm 
at news from England that the charter was to be 
revoked, that a general governor of New England 
was to be appointed, and that a force was to be 
sent to support his authority. Laud was put at 
the head of a commission for the government of 
the colonies in April, 1634. There could be no 
doubt of the meaning of this measure. For more 
than a year the alarm in Massachusetts continued. 
The ministers were consulted regarding the law- 
fulness of resistance to force. A platform was con- 
structed on the northeast side of Castle Island, and 
a fortified house was proposed to defend the plat- 
form. The trainbands were drilled, muskets, 
" bandeleroes " or cartridge belts, and rests were 
distributed to the several towns, and pikemen were 
required to learn to use the cumbrous musket 
of the time. Puritans in England, angry that 
Laud, the new archbishop and old persecutor, 
should stretch a long arm to America, sent powder 
and cannon to their co-religionists, the object of 
whose military vigilance could easily be covered 
by dangers from the savages, from the French, 
or from the Spaniards. 

But these assiduous preparations, under the 
supervision of a military commission which had 
" power of life and limb," did not abate in the least 
the discussion of questions of doctrine and casuis- 
try. Refinements of theology were quite as real 



TJie Prophet of Religious Freedom. 



285 



and substantial to the Puritan mind as trainbands 
and fortifications. Sound doctrine and a scrupu- 
lous observance of the " ordinances " conciliated 
God ; they were indeed more important elements 
of public safety than drakes and demi-culverins. 

The General Court of September, 1634, under- 
took to provide for the public safety in both re- 
spects. Along with regulations and provisions of 
a military nature, it set out to remove those fla- 
grant sins that had provoked the divine wrath. 
The wearing of silver, gold, and rich laces, girdles, 
and hatbands was forbidden ; slashed clothes were 
also abolished, " other than one slash in each sleeve 
and another in the back " ; ruffs and beaver hats, 
which last were apparently a mark of dudishness, 
were not to be allowed. Long hair and other 
fashions " prejudicial to the general good " were 
done away with in this hour of penitence. Men 
and women might wear out the clothes they had, 
except their " immoderate great sleeves, slashed 
apparel, immoderate great rayles, long wings," 
which were to go at once without reprieve or 
ceremony. The use of tobacco, socially and in 
public, or before strangers was made an offense. 
If taken secretly or medicinally, the Court did not 
take cognizance of it. 

X. 

Seeing that the millinery sins recounted in this 
act had cried to Heaven, and that, beside the dan- 
ger from England, there was the desire of Hook- 



Chap. II. 



Reform in 
dress. 



Mass. Rec- 
ords, 3d 
Septem- 
ber, 1634. 



Compare 

W^ard's 

Simple 

Cobbler, 

passim. 



The fast- 
day ser- 
mon. 



286 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



er's party to remove to the Connecticut, and a 
dissension concerning the power of the Upper 
House that threatened trouble, the Court ap- 
pointed the 1 8th of September a solemn fast day, 
hoping by repentance, prayer, and the penance 
of hunger to avert the manifold disasters that 
threatened them. Roger Williams was sure to 
speak like a prophet on such an occasion. He did 
not stop at slashed garments, great sleeves, and 
headdresses \vith long wings; he preached on 
eleven " public sins " that had provoked divine 
wrath. We have no catalogue left us. The list 
may have included some of those amusing scruples 
that he held in common with other Puritans, or 
some of those equally trivial personal scruples that 
Williams cherished so fondly. But no sermon of 
his on public sins could fail to contain a declara- 
tion of his far-reaching and cherished principle of 
religious freedom, including perhaps a round de- 
nunciation of the petty inquisition into private 
opinion which had been set up in Massachusetts. 
The Sabbath law, the law obliging men to pay a 
tax to support religious worship, the requirement 
that all should attend religious worship under 
penalty, and the enforcement of a religious oath 
on irreligious and perhaps unwilling residents, the 
assumption of the magistrate to regulate the ortho- 
doxy of a church under the advice of the ministers, 
were points of Massachusetts law and administra- 
tion that he denounced at various times ; and some 
of them, if not all, were no doubt put in pillory in 



TJie Prophet of Religions Freedom. 



287 



this fast-day sermon in the early autumn of 1634. 
Judged by modern standards, the sermon may 
have had absurdities enough, but it was no doubt 
a long way in advance of the General Court's 
mewling about lace, and slashes, and long hair, and 
other customs " prejudicial to the general good." 
To this sermon, whatever it was, Williams after- 
ward attributed the beginning of the troubles that 
led to his banishment. 

XI. 

Winthrop, just but gentle, narrow-minded but 
ever large-hearted, had been superseded in the 
governorship by Dudley, open and zealous advo- 
cate of religious intolerance. Dudley, who was 
always hot-tempered, was for proceeding out of 
hand with the bold "teacher" of the church in 
Salem, but he felt bound to consult with the minis- 
ters first, since Williams was an " elder," and even 
among Puritans there was a sort of benefit of 
clergy. Cotton had developed a complete system 
of church-state organization hammered out of, or 
at least supported by, Bible texts linked by in- 
genious inferences, and from the time of Cotton's 
arrival there was a strong effort to secure uni- 
formity. But Cotton was timid in action, and he 
was nothing if not orderly and ecclesiastical. Wil- 
liams was an elder, entitled as such to be pro- 
ceeded with " in a church way " first. As leader 
and spokesman of the clergy Cotton expressed his 
charitable conviction that Williams's " violent 



Chap. II. 



Williams 
dealt with 
ecclesias- 
tically. 



288 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note lo. 



The gov- 
ernor's 
verse. 



Eliot's 
New Eng- 
land Biog- 
raphy, 
156, 157. 



course did rather spring from scruple of con- 
science than from a seditious principle." The 
clergy proposed to try to convert him by argu- 
ment, not so much, perhaps, from hope of success 
as from a conviction that this was the orderly and 
scriptural rule. Dudley, impatient to snuff out 
Williams at once, replied that they " were de- 
ceived in him if they thought he would conde- 
scend to learn of any of them." But the " elders " 
now proceeded in the roundabout way prescribed 
by Cotton's system ingeniously deduced from 
Scripture. The individual church must deal with 
its own member ; the sister churches might re- 
monstrate with a church. Cotton and Wilson, for 
example, could appeal to the Boston church to ap- 
peal to the Salem church to appeal to Williams, 
and in this order much of the correspondence 
went on. 

It was, perhaps, when his desire to act promptly 
against the Salem heretic was thus foiled by Cot- 
ton's prudent and intricate orderliness in procedure 
that Dudley relieved his emotions by what is hap- 
pily the only example of his verse that has sur- 
vived : 

Let men of God in courts and churches watch 
O'er such as do a toleration hatch, 
Lest that ill ^gg bring forth a cockatrice 
To poison all with heresy and vice. 
If men be left and otherwise combine, 
My epitaph's I die no libertine. 



The Prophet of Religious Freedom. 



289 



XII. 

The most substantial grievance of the rulers 
against Williams was his opposition to " the oath." 
In order to make sure of the loyalty of the resi- 
dents in this time of danger a new oath of fidelity 
to be taken by residents had been promulgated. 
Practical men are wont to put aside minor scruples 
in time of danger. David eats the sacred shew- 
bread when he is famishing; but Williams would 
rather starve than mumble a crumb of it. He did 
not believe in enforced oaths ; they obliged the 
wicked man to a religious act, and thus invaded 
the soul's freedom. Cotton says that Williams's 
scruples excited such an opposition to the oath 
that the magistrates were not able to enforce it. 
He thus unwittingly throws a strong light on the 
weakness of the age, and extenuates the conduct 
of Williams as well as that of the rulers. The age 
was in love with scrupulosity, and Williams on this 
side was the product of his time. In such an age 
a scruple-maker of ability and originality like Wil- 
liams might be a source of danger. 

During the year following Williams was several 
times " convented " before the Court. He was 
charged with having broken his promise not to 
speak about the patent, with opposing the resi- 
dents' oath, with maintaining certain scruples in 
opposition to the customs of the times, as that a 
man should not return thanks after a meal, or call 

on an unregenerate child to give thanks for his 
20 



Chap. II. 



Note II. 



Scruples 
small and 
great. 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



'Williams 
inflexible. 



Savage's 
Win- 
throp's 
Journal, i, 
8i. 

Mass. Rec, 
i. 135, U6. 



food. These were not more trivial certainly than 
half a hundred scruples then prevalent, but they 
chanced to be unfashionable — a damning fault in a 
scruple. The sense of proportion was feeble in re- 
ligionists of that da}', and neither Williams nor his 
opponents understood the comparative magnitude 
of his greater contentions, and the triviality of 
those petty scruples about wdiich, like the whole 
Puritan world, he was very busy. Religious free- 
dom and the obligation of grace after meat could 
then be put into the same category. As years 
went by, although the mind of Williams was never 
disentangled from scrupulosity, he came to see 
clearly what was the real battle of his life. No 
better fortune can befall a great spirit than such a 
clarification of vision. The extended works of 
Williams's later life are written mainly to over- 
throw the " bloody tenent of persecution." It was 
this championship of soul liberty as the weightiest 
matter of the law that lifted him above all others 
who paid tithes of their little garden herbs. 

Williams was certainly incorrigible. Richard 
Brown, the ruling elder of the church at Water- 
town, seems to have submitted to the remonstrance 
of the magistrates against his too charitable judg- 
ment of the Roman churches, Eliot, of Roxbur}'-, 
afterward the Indian apostle, advanced peculiar 
opinions also, but he was overborne and convinced. 
Stoughton, who had denied that the " assistants " 
of a corporation were scriptural magistrates, was 
brought to book about this time, and he retracted. 



The Prophet of Religious Freedom. 



291 



Salem itself was forced to bend its stiff neck at 
last. The town had been refused its land on 
Marble Neck because of its ordination of Williams, 
and having, under Williams's leadership, protested 
in a letter to the churches against the injustice of 
spiritual coercion by financial robbery, the depu- 
ties of Salem were now summarily turned out of 
the court. Endecott, with characteristic violence, 
protested further against the double injustice to 
Salem. He was promptly put under arrest, and 
this severity brought swift conviction to his mind, 
so that he humbly apologized and submitted the 
same day. The only bond of unity between the 
rash Salem leader and Williams was a common 
tendency to go to extremes. In spirit, the heroic, 
long-suffering Williams, who rested in what he 
called the " rockie strength " of his opinions in 
spite of penalties and majorities, was far removed 
from a leader who bent before the first blast, and 
who became in later life the harshest persecutor 
in the commonwealth. 

XIII. 

Williams remained the one resolute, stubborn, 
incorrigible offender. Eliot, Stoughton, and Ende- 
cott, and even Williams's fellow-elder, Sharpe, and 
the whole church at Salem, might be argued into 
conformity by the sharp dialectics of the clergy, or 
bullied out of their convictions by the sharper logic 
of the magistrates, but Roger Williams could not 
be overborne. Individualist in his very nature, his 



Chap. II. 



Mass. Rec, 

i, 156, 157- 
Win- 
throp's 
Journal, i, 
194. 



Wil- 
liams's 
trial. 



292 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 12. 



Williams 
banished. 



Note 13. 



self-reliant spirit was able to face isolation or ex- 
communication. The great Hooker was set to dis- 
pute with him. Hooker's refined arguments were 
drawn out by inferences linked to inferences. He 
proved to the satisfaction of everybody but the 
culprit that it was not lawful for Williams, with his 
opinions, to set food before his unregenerate child, 
since he did not allow an irreligious child to go 
through the form of giving thanks. But the wire- 
drawn logic of Hooker, though Williams could not 
always answer it, had no more influence with him 
than the ingenious sophistications of the pious 
Cotton ; Williams constantly fell back upon the 
" rockie strength " of his principles. On the 9th 
of October, 1635, he was sentenced to banishment. 
After the manner of that curious age, his banish- 
ment was based on charges of great importance 
mixed with charges utterly trivial. His denial of 
the authority of the magistrate to regulate the 
orthodoxy of the churches and the belief of indi- 
viduals is, however, made one of the cardinal 
offenses in all the trustworthy accounts given at 
the time. With this were joined in the proceed- 
ings, but not in the sentence, such things as the 
denial of the propriety of grace after meat. All 
the elders but one advised his banishment. 

The magistrates, though deeply " incensed " 
against him, probably felt at the last some reluc- 
tance to banish such a man. Six weeks were ac- 
corded him in which to leave. Winthrop, who 
was Williams's friend, and who seems to have been 



Tlie PropJict of Religious Freedom. 



293 



loath to consent to his banishment, wrote to him to 
*' steer his course for Narragansett Bay," where 
there was territory beyond the bounds of Massa- 
chusetts and Plymouth. The forest journeys or 
boat voyages to Boston and back, the bitter con- 
troversies there, and the uproar of indignation 
which was produced in Salem by the news of the 
verdict, the desertion of Williams by Endecott, con- 
vinced by force, and by Sharpe, the ruling elder, 
who had been also dealt with, the natural yielding 
of the Salem church after a while to the pressure 
from the General Court, and to the desire of the 
townsmen to secure the lands at Marble Neck, put 
a strain on Williams which, added to his necessary 
toil in the field, broke his health and he fell ill. 
The General Court probably also felt the recoil of 
its act. When six weeks had expired consent 
was given that Williams should remain during the 
winter provided he would refrain from preaching. 
But Williams was in Salem, and in Salem he was 
the center of interest — just now he was the center 
of explosion. It was impossible for the great Sep- 
aratist to be silent. A few faithful friends, corae- 
outers like himself, clave to him and repudiated as 
he did communion with the church at Salem, which 
could condone the offenses of the magistrates for 
the sake of " these children's toys of land, meadows, 
cattle, and government." These fellow-Separatists, 
some of whom perhaps had removed from Plj-m- 
outh out of love for this unworldly saint, loved him 
none the less for his courage and his sorrows. 



Chap, II. 



Note 14. 



Note 15. 



294 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note i6. 



Savage's 

Win- 

throp, 

i, 20p, 2IO. 



They frequented his house on Sunday as he con- 
valesced. Indeed, the attachment to him was so 
great that the " ordinances " which had been ap- 
pointed by the magistrates and enforced on Salem 
as the price of the common land on Marble Neck, 
were neglected and almost deserted. Williams 
could not refrain from speech with this concourse 
of visitors, and at length word came to Boston that 
more than twenty persons had definitely adhered 
to the opinions of their former teacher, uncon- 
vinced by the argument of the rod of justice ap- 
plied to Endecott and Sharpe, or by the valuable 
land on Marble Neck. These disciples proposed 
to remove in the spring with Williams to the shores 
of Narragansett Bay. This might meet the ap- 
proval of the sagacious and kindly Winthrop, who 
had directed Williams's attention to that promising 
place, and who foresaw perhaps the usefulness of 
such a man in the dangerous Indian crisis now 
threatening the colony. But to devotees of uni- 
formity, the prospect of a community on the very 
border of the land of the saints tolerating all sorts 
of opinionists was insufferable. When once the 
civil government weights itself with spiritual con- 
siderations, its whole equilibrium is disturbed. 
Liberty and justice seem insignificant by the side 
of the immensities. The magistrates, or a part of 
them, were alarmed at the prospect of a settlement 
of the followers of Williams at Narragansett Bay, 
" whence the infection would easily spread into 
these churches, the people being, many of them. 



The Proplict of Religious Freedom. 



295 



much taken with an apprehension of his godliness." 
It was therefore agreed to send him to England 
on a ship soon to sail. 

XIV. 

The hardships of such a voj^age in midwinter 
in his state of health might prove fatal, and his 
arrival in England would almost certainly deliver 
him into the hands of Laud. But what is justice 
or mercy when the welfare of churches and the 
rescue of imperiled souls is to be considered ? A 
warrant was dispatched ordering him to Boston 
within a certain time. Probably knowing what 
was in store for him, he protested that it would be 
dangerous for him, in view of his health, to make 
the journey, and some of the Salem people went to 
Boston in his behalf, and, as was natural in the cir- 
cumstances, made exaggerated representations re- 
garding his physical condition. But the magistrates 
had other information. They sent the valiant and 
notorious Captain Underhill, in whom were min- 
gled about equally devoutness, military courage, 
and incorrigible lewdness, to bring Williams by 
sea in a shallop. Williams was probably informed 
of their purpose, for, while Underhill in his little 
craft was beating up to Salem in wintry seas on an 
errand so congenial, expecting perhaps to come 
upon his quarry unawares, Williams was fleeing 
from one hamlet of bark wigwams to another. 
Here among the barbarians he was sure of faithful 
friends and secure concealment. Underhill found 



Chap. II. 



Escape to 
the In- 
dians. 



296 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Williams 
founds 
Provi- 
dence, 



on his arrival that the culprit had disappeared 
three days before he got there, and nobody in 
Salem, that could, would tell whither the fugitive 
had gone. 

Meantime Williams was, to use his own figure 
of speech, " steering his course " " in winter snow " 
toward Narragansett Bay. " I was sorely tossed 
for one fourteen weeks in a bitter winter season," 
he says, in his vivid and hyperbolic fashion of 
speech, " not knowing what bed or bread did 
mean." He began one settlement on the eastern 
bank of the Seekonk River after getting land from 
the Indians, but his old enemies the royal patents 
now had their revenge. Winslow, governor of 
Plymouth, a kind-hearted, politic man, the one born 
diplomatist of New England, warned him that he 
was within the bounds of Plymouth, and asked 
him to remove to the other side of the water, be- 
cause they " were loath to displease the Bay." It 
was not enough to drive a heretic from the bounds 
of Massachusetts; the pragmatic Puritanism of the 
time would have expelled him from the continent 
had its arm been long enough. Williams had al- 
ready begun to build and to plant, but he removed 
once more to the place which he named Provi- 
dence. He planted the germinal settlement of 
the first state in the world that founded religious 
liberty on the widest possible basis, reserving to 
the law no cognizance whatever of religious beliefs 
or conduct where the " civil peace " was not en- 
dangered. 



TJie Prophet of Religious Freedom. 



297 



XV. 

Local jealousy and sectarian prejudice have 
done what they could to obscure the facts of the 
trial and banishment of Williams. It has been ar- 
gued by more than one writer that it was not a 
case of religious persecution at all, but the exclu- 
sion of a man dangerous to the state. Cotton, 
with characteristic verbal legerdemain, says that 
Williams was " enlarged " rather than banished. 
The case has even been pettifogged in our own 
time by the assertion that the banishment was 
only the action of a commercial company exclud- 
ing an uncongenial person from its territory. But 
with what swift indignation would the Massachu- 
setts rulers of the days of Dudley and Haynes 
have repudiated a plea which denied their magis- 
tracy ! They put so strong a pressure on Stough- 
ton, who said that the assistants were not magis- 
trates, that he made haste to renounce his pride 
of authorship and to deliver his booklet to be offi- 
cially burned, nor did even this prevent his punish- 
ment. The rulers of " the Bay " were generally 
frank advocates of religious intolerance ; they re- 
garded toleration as a door set open for the devil 
to enter. Not only did they punish for unortho- 
dox expressions ; they even assumed to inquire into 
private beliefs. Williams was only one of scores 
bidden to depart on account of opinion. 

The real and sufficient extenuation for the con- 
duct of the Massachusetts leaders is found in the 



Chap. II. 



Wil- 
liams's 
banish- 
ment an 
act of per- 
secution. 



Note 17. 



Intoler- 
ance as a 
virtue. 



298 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III, 



Note 18. 



Note 19. 



character and standards of the age. A few ob- 
scure and contemned sectaries — Brownists, Ana- 
baptists, and despised Familists — in Holland and 
England had spoken more or less clearly in favor 
of religious liberty before the rise of Roger Wil- 
liams, but nobody of weight or respectable stand- 
ing in the whole world had befriended it. All the 
great authorities in church and state. Catholic 
and Protestant, prelatical and Puritan, agreed in 
their detestation of it. Even Robinson, the mod- 
erate pastor of the Leyden Pilgrims, ventured to 
hold only to the " toleration of tolerable opinions." 
This was the toleration found at Amsterdam and 
in some other parts of the Low Countries. Even 
this religious sufferance which did not amount to 
liberty was sufficiently despicable in the eyes of 
that intolerant age to bring upon the Dutch the 
contempt of Christendom. It was a very qualified 
and limited toleration, and one from which Catho- 
lics and Arminians were excluded. It seems to 
have been that practical amelioration of law which 
is produced more effectually by commerce than by 
learning or religion. Outside of some parts of the 
Low Countries, and oddly enough of the Turkish 
Empire, all the world worth counting decried tol- 
eration as a great crime. It would have been won- 
derful indeed if Massachusetts had been superior 
to the age. " I dare aver," says Nathaniel Ward, 
the New England lawyer-minister, " that God doth 
no where in his word tolerate Christian States to 
give tolerations to such adversaries of his Truth, if 



TJie Proplict of Religions Freedom. 



299 



they have power in their hands to suppress them." 
To set up toleration was " to build a sconce against 
the walls of heaven to batter God out of his chair," 
in Ward's opinion. 

XVI. 

This doctrine of intolerance was sanctioned by 
many refinements of logic, such as Cotton's deli- 
cious sophistry that if a man refused to be con- 
vinced of the truth, he was sinning against con- 
science, and therefore it was not against the liberty 
of conscience to coerce him. Cotton's moral intui- 
tions were fairly suffocated by logic. He declared 
that men should be compelled to attend religious 
service, because it was " better to be hypocrites 
than profane persons. Hypocrites give God part 
of his due, the outward man, but the profane 
person giveth God neither outward nor inward 
man." To reason thus is to put subtlety into the 
catlicdra of common sense, to bewilder vision by 
legerdemain. Notwithstanding his natural gift for 
devoutness and his almost immodest godliness, 
Cotton was incapable of high sincerity. He would 
not specifically advise Williams's banishment, but 
having labored with him round a corner according 
to his most approved ecclesiastical formula, he 
said, " We have no more to say in his behalf, but 
must sit down " ; by which expression of passivity 
he gave the signal to the " secular arm " to do its 
worst, while he washed his hands in innocent self- 
complacency. When one scrupulous magistrate 



Chap. II. 

Simple 
Cobbler of 
Agawam, 
pp. 3 and 6. 



The casu- 
istry of 
Cotton. 



Note 20. 



Hutchin- 
son Papers, 
406. 



300 



Coitrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 21. 



Contro- 
versie con- 
cerning 
Liberty 
of Con- 
science. 



Character 
of Puri- 
tanism. 



consulted him as to his obligation in Williams's 
case, Cotton answered his hesitation by saying, 
" You know they are so much incensed against his 
course that it is not your voice nor the voice of 
two or three more that can suspend the sentence." 
B}'- such shifty phrases he shirked responsibility 
for the results of his own teaching. Of the temper 
that stands alone for the right, Nature had given 
him not a jot. Williams may be a little too severe, 
but he has some truth when he describes Cotton 
on this occasion as " swimming with the stream of 
outward credit and profit," though nothing was 
further from Cotton's conscious purpose than such 
worldliness. Cotton's intolerance was not like that 
of Dudley and Endecott, the offspring of an aus- 
tere temper ; it was rather the outgrowth of his 
logic and his reverence for authorit)\ He shel- 
tered himself behind the examples of Elizabeth and 
James I, and took refuge in the shadow of Calvin, 
whose burning of Servetus he cites as an example, 
without any recoil of heart or conscience. But the 
consideration of the character of the age forbids 
us to condemn the conscientious men who put Wil- 
liams out of the Massachusetts theocracy as they 
would have driven the devil out of the garden of 
Eden. When, however, it comes to judging the 
age itself, and especially to judging the Puritanism 
of the age, these false and harsh ideals are its suffi- 
cient condemnation. Its government and its very 
religion were barbarous ; its Bible, except for mys- 
tical and ecclesiastical uses, might as well have 



Tlie Prophet of Religions Frccdovi. 



301 



closed with the story of the Hebrew judges and 
the imprecatory Psahns. The Apocalypse of John, 
grotesquely interpreted, was the one book of the 
New Testament that received hearty considera- 
tion, aside from those other New Testament pas- 
sages supposed to relate to a divinely appointed 
ecclesiasticism. The humane pity of Jesus was un- 
known not only to the laws, but to the sermons of 
the time. About the time of Williams's banish- 
ment the lenity of John Winthrop was solemnly 
rebuked by some of the clergy and rulers as a lax 
imperiling of the safety of the gospel ; and Win- 
throp, overborne by authority, confessed, ex- 
plained, apologized, and promised amendment. 
The Puritans substituted an unformulated belief 
in the infallibility of " godly " elders acting with 
the mapfistrates for the ancient doctrine of an in- 
fallible church. 

XVII. 

In this less scrupulous but more serious age it 
is easy to hold Williams up to ridicule. Never 
was a noble and sweet-spirited man bedeviled by a 
scrupulosity more trivial. Cotton aptly dubbed 
him "a haberdasher of small questions." His ex- 
tant letters are many of them vibrant with latent 
heroism ; there is manifest in them an exquisite 
charity and a pathetic magnanimity, but in the 
midst of it all the writer is unable to rid himself of 
a swarm of scruples as pertinacious as the buzzing 
mosquitoes in the primitive forest about him. In 



Chap. II. 



Note 22. 



Savage's 
Winthrop, 
i, 211-214. 



Character 
of Wil- 
liams. His 
scruples. 

New Eng- 
land Fire- 
brand 
Quenched, 
246. 



302 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Williams 
to Win- 
throp, 
1637, Narr. 
Club, vi. 



Note 



■Williams 
becomes a 
Seeker, 



dating his letters, where he ventures to date at all, 
he never writes the ordinary name of the day of 
the week or the name of the month, lest he should 
be guilty of etymological heathenism. He often 
avoids writing the year, and when he does insert 
it he commits himself to the last two figures only 
and adds a saving clause. Thus 1652 appears as 
" 52 (so called)," and other years are tagged with 
the same doubting words, or with the Latin " ut 
•vulgo." What quarrel the tender conscience had 
with the Christian era it is hard to guess. So, too, 
he writes to Winthrop, who had taken part in his 
banishment, letters full of reverential tenderness 
and hearty friendship. But his conscience does 
not allow him even to seem to hold ecclesiastical 
fellowship with the man he honors as a ruler and 
loves as a friend. Once at least he guards the point 
directly by subscribing himself " Your worship's 
faithful and affectionate in all civil bonds." It 
would be sad to think of a great spirit so enthralled 
by the scrupulosity of his time and his party if 
these minute restrictions had been a source of an- 
noyance to him. But the cheerful observance of 
little scruples seems rather to have taken the place 
of a recreation in his life ; they were to him per- 
haps what bric-a-brac is to a collector, what a well- 
arranged altar and candlesticks are to a ritualist. 

Two fundamental notions supplied the motive 
power of every ecclesiastical agitation of that age. 
The notion of a succession of churchly order and 
ordinance from the time of the apostles was the 



'The PropJiet of Religious Freedoui. 



303 



mainspring of the High-church movement. Apos- 
tolic primitivism was the aim of the Puritan and 
still more the goal of the Separatist. One party 
rejoiced in a belief that a mysterious apostolic vir- 
tue had trickled down through generations of bish- 
ops and priests to its own age ; the other rejoiced 
in the destruction of institutions that had grown 
up in the ages and in getting back to the primi- 
tive nakedness of the early Christian conventicle. 
True to the law of his nature, Roger Williams 
pushed this latter principle to its ultimate possi- 
bilities. If we may believe the accounts, he and 
his followers at Providence became Baptists that 
they might receive the rite of baptism in its most 
ancient Oriental form. But in an age when the 
fountains of the great deep were utterly broken up 
he could find no rest for the soles of his feet. It 
was not enough that he should be troubled by 
the Puritan spirit of apostolic primitivism ; he had 
now swung round to where this spirit joined hands 
with its twin, the aspiration for apostolic succes- 
sion. He renounced his baptism because it was 
without apostolic sanction, and announced himself 
of that sect which was the last reduction of Sepa- 
ratism. He became a Seeker. 

Here again is a probable influence from Hol- 
land. The Seekers had appeared there long be- 
fore. Many Baptists had found that their search 
for primitivism, if persisted in, carried them to this 
negative result; for it seemed not enough to have 
apostolic rites in apostolic form unless they were 



Chap. II. 



Note 24. 



The 
Seekers. 



304 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book HI. 



Moral ele- 
vation of 
Williams. 



sanctioned by the " gifts " of the apostolic time. 
The Seekers appeared in England as early as 1617, 
and during the religious turmoils of the Common- 
wealth period the sect afforded a resting place for 
many a weatherbeaten soul. As the miraculous 
gifts were lost, the Seekers dared not preach, bap- 
tize, or teach ; they merely waited, and in their 
mysticism they believed their waiting to be an 
" upper room " to which Christ would come. It is 
interesting to know that Williams, the most roman- 
tic figure of the whole Puritan movement, at last 
found a sort of relief from the austere externalism 
and ceaseless dogmatism of his age by traveling 
the road of literalism until he had passed out on 
the other side into the region of devout and con- 
tented uncertainty. 

XVIII. 

In all this Williams was the child of his age, 
and sometimes more childish than his age. But 
there were regions of thought and sentiment in 
which he was wholly disentangled from the meshes 
of his time, and that not because of intellectual su- 
periority — for he had no large philosophical views — 
but by reason of elevation of spirit. Even the au- 
thority of Moses could not prevent him from con- 
demning the harsh severity of the New England 
capital laws. He had no sentimental delusions 
about the character of the savages — he styles them 
" wolves endued with men's brains " ; but he con- 
stantly pleads for a humane treatment of them. 



The Prop]ict of Religions Freedom. 



305 



All the bloody precedents of Joshua could not 
make him look without repulsion on the slaughter 
of women and children in the Pequot war, nor 
could he tolerate dismemberment of the dead or 
the selling of Indian captives into perpetual slavery. 
From bigotry and resentment he was singularly 
free. On many occasions he jo3'fully used his 
ascendency over the natives to protect those who 
kept in force against him a sentence of perpet- 
ual banishment. And this ultra-Separatist, almost 
alone of the men of his time, could use such words 
of catholic charity as those in which he speaks of 
" the people of God vv^heresoever scattered about 
Babel's banks either in Rome or England." 

Of his incapacity for organization or adminis- 
tration we shall have to speak hereafter. But his 
spiritual intuitions, his moral insight, his genius 
for justice, lent a curious modernness to many of 
his convictions. In a generation of creed-builders 
which detested schism he became an individualist. 
Individualist in thought, altruist in spirit, secular- 
ist in governmental theory, he was the herald of a 
time yet more modern than this laggard age of 
ours. If ever a soul saw a clear-shining inward 
light not to be dimmed by prejudices or obscured 
by the deft logic of a disputatious age, it was the 
soul of Williams. In all the region of petty scrupu- 
ulosity the time-spirit had enthralled him ; but in 
the higher region of moral decision he was utterl}' 
emancipated from it. His conclusions belong to 

ages yet to come. 
21 



Chap. II. 



Superior 
to the age. 



300 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 

His pro- 
phetic 
character. 



This union of moral aspiration with a certain 
diseng-agedness constitutes what we may call the 
prophetic temperament. Bradford and Winthrop 
were men of high aspiration, but of another class. 
The reach of their spirits was restrained by prac- 
tical wisdom, which compelled them to take into 
account the limits of the attainable. Not that they 
consciously refused to follow their logic to its end, 
but that, like other prudent men of affairs, they 
were, without their own knowledge or consent, 
turned aside by the logic of the impossible. Pre- 
cisely here the prophet departs from the reformer. 
The prophet recks nothing of impossibility ; he is 
ravished with truth disembodied. From Elijah the 
Tishbite to Socrates, from Socrates to the latest 
and perhaps yet unrecognized voice of our own 
time, the prophetic temperament has ever shown 
an inability to enter into treaty with its environ- 
ment. In the seventeenth century there was no 
place but the wilderness for such a John Baptist of 
the distant future as Rosrer Williams. He did not 
belong among the diplomatic builders of churches, 
like Cotton, or the politic founders of states, like 
Winthrop. He w^as but a babbler to his own time, 
but the prophetic voice rings clear and far, and 
ever clearer as the ages go on. 



TIic Prophet of Religious Freedom. 



307 



Elucidations. 

Sir William Martin, an early friend of Williams, describes 
him as passionate and precipitate, but with integrity and good 
intentions. Hutchinson Papers, 106. See also, for example, the 
two letters of Williams to Lady Barrington, in New England 
Genealogical Register, July, 1889, pp. 316 and following. 

Letter to John Cotton the younger, 25th March, 1671. " He 
knows what gains and preferments I have refused in universities, 
city, country and court," etc. Williams's enthusiastic nature 
gave a flush of color to his statement of cfrdinary fact, the general 
correctness of which, however, there is never reason to doubt. 

Letter to John Cotton the younger, Narragansett Club Publi- 
cations, vi, 356. There is no account of this event elsewhere, but 
the church records of that early date are imperfect, and there is 
every reason to accept the circumstantial statement of Williams. 
That he refused to enter into membership with the church is 
confirmed by Winthrop's Journal, 12th April, 1631, and such re- 
fusal must have had some such occasion. 

" We have often tried your patience, but could never conquer 
it," were Winthrop's words to Williams, who gave to Massa- 
chusetts lifelong service in return for its lifelong severity toward 
him. The sentence is quoted in Williams's letter to the 
younger Cotton, cited above, which is itself a fine example of 
his magnanimity of spirit. Narragansett Club Publications, vi, 
351-357- 

There is difference of opinion on this point, but certain words 
of Williams himself seem to bear on it. After his retirement 
from Salem to Plymouth he received a letter from Winthrop, 
which appears to have intimated that no man under twenty-five 
ought to be ordained. Williams explains in reply that he is 
" nearer upwards of thirty than twenty-five," but avers, " I am 
no elder in any church . . . nor ever shall be, if the Lord please 
to grant my desires that I may intend what I long after, the 
natives souls." Williams's Letter, Narragansett Club Publica- 
tions, vi, 2. Of course, these words might have been written if 
he had resigned the eldership before leaving Salem, but they 
would have had much less pertinency. 



Chap. II. 



Note I, 
page 268. 



Note 2, 
page 269. 



Note 3, 
page 270. 



<r. 



Note 4, 
page 271. 



Note 5, 
page 272. 



3o8 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Pla?tting. 



Book III. 

Note 6, 
page 276. 



Note 7, 
page 27S, 



Note 8, 
page 279. 



Note 9, 
page 281, 



Note 10, 
page 288. 



Note II, 
page 289. 



Mr. Straus, in his Life of Roger Williams, says aptly that 
Massachusetts was under a government of congregations rather 
than of towns, since only church members could vote. A fuller 
discussion of the source and evolution of the town system is de- 
ferred to a later volume of this series. 

David Pieterzen de Vries, in his Voyages, reports this feeling 
of superiority as freely expressed at Hartford in 1639. There is a 
quaint humor in what he says of it that is enhanced by the 
naive Dutch phrase in which it is set down : " Dit Volck gaven 
haer uyt det sy Israeliten waren, ende dat wy aen onse colonic 
Egyptenaren waren, end' Engelsen inde Vergienies waren mede 
Egyptenaren," p. 151. 

" And such was the authority . . . Mr. Cotton had in the 
hearts of the people, that whatever he delivered in the pulpit was 
soon put into an Order of Court, if of a civil, or set up as a prac- 
tice in the church, if of an ecclesiastical concernment." Hubbard, 
History of Massachusetts, 182. 

Knowles's Life of Williams, 58, note, quotes from a letter of 
Coddington's appended to Fox's reply to Williams, in which 
Coddington, who was one of the magistrates that examined the 
treatise, charges Williams with having " written a quarto against 
the King's patent and authority." 

Cotton's Answer to Williams's Examination, 38. I have fol- 
lowed Cotton implicitly here, but without feeling sure that his 
memory can ever be depended on where his polemical feeling is 
concerned. On the next page he is guilty of a flagrant but no 
doubt unconscious suppression of an important fact. "It pleased 
the Lord to open the hearts of the Church to assist us," etc., he 
says, putting out of sight the sharp dealing by which the Salem 
church was brought to ignominious subjection. 

Cotton's Answer to Williams, 29. Compare also Massachu- 
setts Records of 4th March, 1633, where a mercenary inducement 
to take the oath is offered by making the regulations for record- 
ing the lands of freemen apply also to the lands of " residents " 
presumably not church members and ineligible to the franchise, 
but only to the residents " that had taken or shall hereafter take 
their oathes." Backus supposes that Williams saw some inci- 
dental result from the oath that would be prejudicial to religious 
freedom. This is to suppose that Williams needed a practical 



The Prophet of Religions Freedom. 



309 



consideration to stir him to action — it is to suppose that Wil- 
liams was not Williams. Practical men were afraid the inde- 
pendence of Massachusetts would be lost ; Roger Williams was 
only afraid that Massachusetts would commit a public sin in 
trying to escape the impending evil. A conscience undefiled 
was his objective point in private and public life ; safety, public 
or private, was secondary. 

There has been much ingenious and rather uncandid effort by 
Cotton first of all, and by other defenders of the General Court 
since, to prove that Williams's views on toleration were not a 
cause of his banishment. If those views had been the sole cause, 
the decree would have been more comprehensible and defensible 
in view of the opinions of the age. But the question about the 
validity of the patent, the question of the protest written against 
the course of the magistrates in blackmailing Salem into a refusal to 
support him, the question of the freeman's oath, and, what seems 
to have been deemed of capital importance, the question of grace 
after meat, are all involved at one time or another. The formal 
charges in what may be considered the beginning of the banish- 
ment proceedings, the trial in July, as given by Winthrop, our 
most trustworthy authority, are: i. That the magistrates ought 
not to punish for a religious offense — " the breach of the first 
table " — except where it disturbed the civil peace. 2. That the 
magistrate ought not to tender an oath to an unregenerate man. 

3. That a man ought not to pray with an unregenerate person. 

4. That thanks were not to be given after the sacrament and after 
meat. Savage's Winthrop, i, 193, 194. In the final proceedings 
in October, the letters growing out of the refusal to confirm to 
Salem its outlying land entered into and embittered the con- 
troversy. Winthrop, i, 204. The recorded verdict makes the 
divulging " of dyvers newe and dangerous opinions against the 
aucthoritie of the magistrate " the first offense, and the "letter of 
defamacion " the second. Williams says that a magistrate, who 
appears to have been Haynes, the governor, summed up his 
offenses at the conclusion of the trial under four heads: i. The 
denial of the authority of the patent. 2. The denial of the law- 
fulness of requiring a wicked person to take an oath or pray. 3. 
The denial of the lawfulness of hearing the parish ministers in 
England. 4. The doctrine " that the Civill Magistrates' power 
extends only to the Bodies and Goods and outward State of 
men." Against the evidence of Williams, Winthrop, and the 



Chap. II. 



Note 12, 
page 292. 



3IO 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 13, 
page 292. 



Note 14, 
page 293. 



Note 15, 
page 293. 



Note 16, 
page 294. 



Note 17, 
page 297. 



records, I can not attach any importance to the halting accounts 
given years afterward, for controversial purposes, by Cotton, from 
what he thought was his memory. 

" Whereas Mr. Roger Williams, one of the elders of the 
church at Salem, hath broached and dyvulged dyvers newe and 
dangerous opinions, against the aucthoritie of magistrates, as also 
writt letters of defamacion both of the magistrates & Churches 
here, & that before any conviccion, & yet maintaineth the same 
without retraccion, it is therefore ordered that the said Mr. Wil- 
liams shall departe out of this jurisdiccion within sixe weekes now 
nexte ensueing, which if hee neglect to performe it shall be law- 
full for the Gouernour & two of the magistrates to send him to 
some place out of this jurisdiccion, not to returne any more with- 
out license from the Court." Massachusetts Records, i, 161. 

Neal's History of New England, i, 143. " Sentence of ban- 
ishment being read against Mr. W^illiams, the whole town of 
Salem was in an uproar ; for such was the Popularity of the Man 
and such the Compassion of the People . , . that he would have 
carried off the greatest part of the Inhabitants of the Town if the 
Ministers of Boston had not interposed." Neal appears to derive 
these facts, which wear a countenance of probability, from an 
authority not now known. 

The phrase occurs in Williams's noble letter to Major Mason, 
I St Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, i, 275 and fol- 
lowing. The magnanimity shown toward those opposed to him 
in this letter is probably without a parallel in his age ; it has few 
in any age. 

" The increase of the concourse of people to him on the Lord's 
days in private, to the neglect or deserting of publick Ordinances 
and to the spreading of the Leaven of his corrupt imaginations, 
provoked the Magistrates rather than to breed a winters Si)ir- 
ituale plague in the Countrey, to put upon him a winter's journey 
out of the Countrey." Master John Cotton's Answer to Master 
Roger Williams, 57. 

The main original authorities on the banishment of Williams 
are Winthrop's Journal and the Massachusetts Records of the 
period. Some facts can be gathered from the writings of Wil- 
liams, whose autobiographical passages always have an air of truth 
while they are sometimes vague and often flushed by his enthusi- 



'Jlic PropJiit of Riiioions Freedom. 



3H 



astic temper. Cotton's memory is less to be trusted ; some of 
his statements are in conllict with better authorities. He no 
doul)t believed himself to be truthful, but his ingenious mind was 
unable to be preeise without unconseious sophistieation. Hub- 
bard was of Presbyterian tendencies and totally opposed to all 
lorms of Separatism. He appears to have recorded every exag- 
gerated rumor cherished by Williams's antagonists to his dis- 
credit. Neither in this nor in other matters can we rely much on 
Hubbard's testimony. No critical student of history puts un- 
(juestioniiig confidence in Cotton Mather. His strange mind could 
never utter truth unvarnished. In a case like this, where family 
pride, local feeling, and sectarian prejudice were all on one 
side, and where he had a chance to embroider upon traditions 
already two generations old, it is better to disregard the author 
of the Magnalia entirely. Bentley's Historical Account of Salem, 
in I St Massachusetts Historical Society Collections, vi, is a paper 
that excites admiration for its broadmindedness. It contains in- 
formation not elsevxhere to be found, but it is impossible to tell 
how lar IJentley depi iidcd upon sources not now accessible and 
how fnr he relied on ingenious inferences drawn from his large 
knowledge of local history. The publications of the Narragan- 
sett Club contain the whole controversy between Cotton and 
Williams and all the letters of the latter now known to be ex- 
tant. 1 have in some cases referred to the originals, in others I 
have used these careful reprints. Williams has been rather for- 
tunate in his biographers. Mr. Oscar S. Straus, approaching the 
subject from a fresh standpoint, has produced the latest Life of 
Williams, written in a judicial temper and evincing a rare sym- 
pathy with its subject. The character of Williams has never been 
better drawn than by Mr. Straus, pp. 231-233. The life by T. 
D. Knowles is perha])s the best of the older biographies, Ar- 
nold's History of Rhode Island contains a sketch of Williams, 
and Elton's brief biography has a value of its own. (iammell's 
Life in Sparks's I5iography is generally fair. "As to Roger Wil- 
liams," by the late Dr. Henry Marlyn Dexter, is, what it pretends 
to be, a partisan statement of the case against Williams. It 
shows characteristic thoroughness of research, it clears up many 
minor points, and is as erudite as it is one-sided. 

Baylie's Sermon bef(jre the House of Lords, on Errours and 
Induration, accuses the Dutch of mere worldly policy in toleration. 
Williams alludes to the charge, Bloudy Tenent yet more Bloudy, 



Chap. II. 



Note 18, 
patje 29.'i. 



312 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 19, 
page 298. 



p. 8. But the toleration of Holland may rather be traced to that 
decay of bigotry and that widening of view which are beneficent 
results of an extended trade. Williams in the Bloudy Tenent 
yet more Bloudy, p. 10, complains of the exclusion of Catholics 
and Arminians from toleration in the Netherlands. It would carry 
us beyond the range of the present work to inquire how far the 
toleration of Amsterdam was related to that " meridian glory " 
which Antwerp reached as early as 1550 by making itself a place 
of refuge for the persecuted of England, France, and Germany. 
The Articles of Union, adopted at Utrecht in 1 579, which have 
been often called the Magna Charta of the Dutch, go to show 
that political and commercial considerations counted in favor of 
toleration, but they also show that some notion of the sacredness 
of the free conscience had been adopted among the Dutch. 
Article XIII of the Union provides that the states of Holland 
and Zealand shall conduct their religious affairs as they think 
good. More qualified arrangements are made for the other states, 
as that they may restrict religious liberty as they shall find need- 
ful for the repose and welfare of the country. But this significant 
provision is added, that every man shall have freedom of private 
belief without arrest or inquisition : " Alidts dat een yder particu- 
lier in syn Religie vry zal moghen blyven, ende dat men nie- 
mandt, ter cause van de Religie, zal moghen achterhalen, ofte 
ondersoecken." Pieter Paulus Verklaring der Unie van Utrecht, 
i, 229, 230. Compare Van Meteren, Nederlandsche Historie, etc., 
iii, 254, 255, and Hooft Nederlandsche Historie, etc.. Book IX, 
where the full text of Article XIII is given. 

Barclay, in his Inner Life of the Religious Societies of the 
Commonwealth, p. 97, cites Peter John Zwisck, a Mennonite of 
West Frisia, as the author, in 1609, of The Liberty of Religion, in 
which he maintains that men are not to be converted by force. 
In i6i4one Leonard Busher petitioned James I in favor of liberty 
of conscience, and Barclay conjectures that he was a member of 
that Separatist or General Baptist church returned from Holland, 
of which Helwyss had been pastor. In 161 5 this obscure and 
proscribed congregation professed a great truth, yet hidden from 
the wise and prudent, namely, that " earthly authority belonged 
to earthly kings, but spiritual authority belonged to that one 
Spiritual king who is king of kings." In more than one matter 
Roger Williams showed himself attracted to the doctrines of the 
Mennonites and their offshoot the English General Baptist body. 



The Prophet of Religious Freedom. 



313 



Whether directly through his reading of Dutch theological works 
or indirectly through English followers of Dutch writers, Williams 
probably derived his broadest principles, in germ at least, from 
the Mennonites or Anabaptists of the gentler sort, as he did also 
some of his minor scruples. For the connection between the 
Mennonites of the Continent and the English cognate sects the 
reader is referred to Barclay's Inner Life, a valuable work of 
much research. See also the petition of the Brownists, 1641, 
cited in Barclay, p. 476, from British Museum, E 34-178, tenth 
pamphlet. 

Another delightful example of the far-fetchedness of Cotton's 
logic is his justification of the sentence of banishment against 
Williams by citing Proverbs xi, 26 : " He that withholdeth corn, 
the people shall curse him." This text, says Cotton, " I alledged 
to prove that the people had much more cause to separate such 
from amongst them (whether by Civill or church-censure) as doe 
withhold or separate them from the Ordinances or the Ordinances 
from them, which are the bread of life." Reply to Williams's Ex- 
amination, 40. The reference in the text is to the same work, 37. 
" Much lesse to persecute him with the Civill Sword till it may 
appeare, even by just and full conviction, that he sinneth not out 
of conscience but against the very light of his own conscience." 
But in Cotton's practice those who labored with the heretic were 
judges of how much argument constituted "just and full convic- 
tion." This logic would have amply sheltered the Spanish In- 
quisition. 

Cotton's Answer to Williams's Examination, 38, 39. Cotton 
confesses to having had further conversation of a nature unfavor- 
able to Williams, but he is able to deny that he counseled his 
banishment. Even Cotton could hardly have prevented it, and 
he confesses that he approved the sentence. The only interest 
in the question is the exhibition of Cotton's habitual shrinking 
from responsibility and his curious sinuosity of conscience. 

In an unpublished work by Mr. Lindsay Swift, of the Boston 
Public Library, which I have been kindly permitted to read, and 
which is a treatise on the election sermons mostly existing only 
in manuscript, the author says : " The early discourses were full 
of ecclesiasticism, a great deal of theology, some politics ; . . . but 
of humanity, brotherly kindness, and what we understand by 
Christianity in the human relations, I have been able to discern 
very little." 



Chap. II. 



Note 20, 
page 299. 



Note 21, 
page 300. 



Note 22, 
page 301. 



314 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 

Note 23, 
page 302. 



Note 24, 
page 303. 



Many of Roger Williams's scruples were peculiar, but his 
scrupulosity was not. Cotton takes pains to call pulpits " scaf- 
folds," to show that they had no sacredness. The scruple about 
the heathen names of days of the week was felt by many other 
Puritans. It is evident in Winthrop, and it did not wholly dis- 
appear from Puritan use until about the end of the seventeenth 
century. 

\ Barclay, Inner Life, etc., 410, 411, cites Sebastian Franck's 
Chronica of 1536, from which it appears that the Seekers in fact 
if not in name existed about a century before Williams adopted 
their views. " Some desire to allow Baptism and other ceremo- 
nies to remain in abeyance till God gives another command — 
sends out true laborers into the harvest. . . . Some others agree 
with those who think the ceremonies since the death of the 
Apostles, are equally departed, laid waste and fallen — that God 
no longer heeds them, and also does not desire that they should 
be longer kept, on which account they will never again be set up 
but now are to proceed entirely in Spirit and in Truth and now in 
an outward manner." The relation of Seekerism to Quakerism 
is manifest. " To be a Seeker is to be of the best Sect next to a 
finder," wrote Cromwell in 1646. 



CHAPTER THE THIRD. 



NEW ENGLAND DISPERSIONS. 



The removal of Roger Williams and his friends 
was the beginning of dispersions from the mother 
colony on Massachusetts Bay. The company that 
settled Providence was too small in number at first 
to be of great importance. The emigration of 
Williams and his followers to the Narragansett 
country was an example that may have turned the 
scale with Hooker and his party in favor of a re- 
moval to the Connecticut instead of to some place 
in the Massachusetts wilderness. Williams cer- 
tainly prepared a harbor for most of the Hutch- 
insonians, and pointed the way to Gortonists, 
Baptists, Quakers, and all others of uneasy con- 
science. Providence Plantation, and at times all 
Rhode Island, fell into disorders inevitable in a 
refuge for scruplers and enthusiasts established by 
one whose energies were centrifugal and disinte- 
grating. But when at length it emerged from its 
primordial chaos the community on Narragansett 
Bay became of capital importance as an example 
of the secularization of the state, and of the con- 
gruity of the largest liberty in religion with civil 
peace. The system which the more highly organ- 

315 



Chap. Ill, 

Impor- 
tance of 
the Rhode 
Island 
colony. 



3i6 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



The Con- 
necticut 
migration. 



Early life 
of Hooker. 



ized and orderly commonwealths of Massachusetts 
and Connecticut labored so diligently to establish 
— a state propping and defending orthodoxy and 
church uniformity — was early cast into the rubbish 
heap of the ages. The principle on which the 
heterogeneous colony of religious outcasts on Nar- 
ragansett Bay founded itself, was stone rejected 
that has become the head of the corner. 

II. 

The emigration to the Connecticut River was 
already incubating w^hen Williams sat down with 
his radical seceders in the Narragansett woods. 
The Connecticut settlement was impelled by more 
various and complicated motives than that of Wil- 
liams, and its origins are not so easy to disentangle. 
But it, too, has an epic interest ; one dominant per- 
sonality overtops all others in this second of ven- 
turesome westward migrations into the wilderness. 

We can trace nothing of Hooker to his birth- 
place, a little hamlet in Leicestershire, except that 
the imagery of his discourses in after life some- 
times reflected the processes of husbandry he had 
known in childhood. But that he passed through 
Emmanuel College, Cambridge, while Chaderton 
was master, is more significant, for Emmanuel was 
the cradle of Puritan divines, the hatching-place of 
Puritan crotchets, the college whose chapel stood 
north and south that it might have no sacred east 
end, a chapel in which " riming psalms " were sung 
instead of the hymns, and where lessons different 



New Ejigland Dispersions. 



317 



from those appointed in the calendar were read. 
Hooker was presented to the living of Chelms- 
ford, in Essex. Here his eloquence attracted wide 
attention, and unhappily attracted at the same time 
the notice of his diocesan Laud, then Bishop of 
London, who drove the preacher from his pulpit. 
Hooker engaged in teaching a school four miles 
from Chelmsford, where Eliot, afterward the In- 
dian apostle, became his usher and disciple. But 
Laud had marked him as one to be brought low. 
He was cited before the Court of High Commis- 
sion, whose penalties he escaped by fleeing to Hol- 
land. Thus early in his career Laud unwittingly 
put in train events that resulted in the founding 
of a second Puritan colony in New England. 

III. 

The persecution of Hooker made a great com- 
motion in Essex, dividing attention with the polit- 
ical struggle between the king and the people about 
tonnage and poundage. While Hooker was an 
exile in Holland a compan}^ of people from Brain- 
tree and other parts of Essex, near his old parish of 
Chelmsford, emigrated to New England, chiefly, 
one may suppose, for the sake of good gospel, since 
they came hoping to tempt Hooker to become 
their pastor. This company settled at Newtown, 
now Cambridge, which had been projected for a 
fortified capital of the colony, that should be de- 
fensible against Indians and out of reach if a sea 
force should be sent from England to overthrow 



Chap. III. 



1630. 



Hooker's 
company. 

Walker's 
First 

Church in 
Hartford, 
40. 

Dudley's 
Letter to 
Countess 
of Lincoln, 
Young's 
Chron. of 
Mass., 320. 
Mass. Rec- 
ords, 
14 June, 
163T, and 
3 February, 
1632. 



3i8 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 

Holmes's 
Hist. Cam- 
bridge, 
ist Mass. 
Hist. Coll., 
vii, 6-8. 



Failure of 
Newtown 
as a me- 
tropolis. 



Savage's 
Win- 
throp, 
i, 98, 99. 
1632. 



Wonder- 
working 
Provi- 
dence, ch. 



Wood's 
N. E. Pros- 
pect, 1634. 
Young, 
402. 



the government. Newtown was palisaded and 
otherwise improved at the expense of the whole 
colony. Hooker's company were perhaps ordered 
to settle there because no place was appropriate to 
the great divine but the new metropolis. 

IV. 

But a metropolis can not be made at will, as 
many a new community has discovered. It had 
been arranged that all the "■ assistants " or ruling 
magistrates of Massachusetts should live within 
the palisades of Newtown, but Winthrop, after the 
frame of his house was erected, changed his mind 
and took down the timbers, setting them up again 
at Boston. This was the beginning of unhappi- 
ness at Newtown, and the discontent had to do, 
no doubt, with the rivalry between that place and 
Boston. It is probable that there was a rise in the 
value of Boston home lots about the time of the 
removal of the governor's house. Trade runs in 
the direction of the least resistance, and peninsular 
Boston was destined by its situation to be the me- 
tropolis of New England in spite of the forces that 
worked for Salem and Newtown. 

Newtown, or Cambridge, to call it by its later 
name, was a long, narrow strip of land, " in forme 
like a list cut off from the Broad-cloath " of Water- 
town and Charlestown. The village was com- 
pactly built, as became an incipient metropolis, and 
the houses were unusually good for a new country. 
In one regard it was superior to Boston. No 



New England Dispersions. 



319 



wooden chimneys or thatched roofs were allowed 
in it. To this town came Hooker, and if it had con- 
tinued to be the capital, Hooker and not Cotton 
might have become the leading spirit of the colony. 
But a capital at a place to which only small ves- 
sels could come up, was not practical, and the 
magistrates in the year before Hooker's arrival 
decided by general consent that Boston was the 
fittest place in the bay for public meetings. 

The hopes of Newtown were perhaps not 
wholly extinct for some time after. The arrival 
of Hooker must have been a great encouragement 
to the people. But Boston was on the alert. That 
town had neither forest nor meadow land. Hay, 
timber, and firewood were brought to its wharf in 
boats. From the absence of wood and marsh came 
some advantages — it was plagued with neither mos- 
quitoes nor rattlesnakes, and what cattle there were 
on the bare peninsula were safe from wolves. Not 
to be behind in evangelical attractions it secured 
Cotton to balance Newtown's Hooker, when both 
arrived in the same ship. That Boston was now 
recognized as the natural metropolis was shown in 
the abortive movement to pay a part of Cotton's 
stipend by a levy on the whole colony. 

V. 

" Ground, wood, and medowe " were matters of 
dispute between Newtown and its neighbors as 
early as 1632, and the frequent references to ques- 
tions regarding the boundary of Newtown go to 



Chap. III. 



October, 
1632. 



Hooker's 

arrival, 

1633- 



Wood's 
N. E. Pros- 
pect. 
Young; 
397. 398. 



Discon- 
tent at 
Newtown. 



320 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III, 

Mass. Rec, 
passim. 



Wonder- 
working 
Provi- 
dence, ch. 



Compare 
Holmes's 
History 
of Cam- 
bridge, 
I Mass. 
Hist. CoU., 
vii, pp. 1,2. 

2d Mass., 
im, 127. 



Cotton and 
Hooker. 



show dissatisfaction in the discarded metropolis, 
the number of whose people was out of proportion 
to its resources. Cattle were scarce in the colony. 
Each head was worth about twenty-eight pounds, 
the equivalent of several hundred dollars of money 
in our time. The Newtown people saw no pros- 
pect of foreign trade, and found the plowable plains 
of Cambridge dry and sand3^ They had given 
up trying to coax fortunes from the stony hill land 
of the town with hand labor, and turned their at- 
tention to the more profitable pursuit of cattle- 
raising. They took unusual pains to protect their 
valuable herd from the wolves by impaling a com- 
mon pasture. Natural meadow was the only re- 
source for hay in the English agriculture of the 
seventeenth century, and the low grounds of Cam- 
bridge yielded a poor grass. Shrewd men in New- 
town already saw that as an agricultural colony 
Massachusetts was destined to failure, and one 
Pratt, a surgeon there, was called to account for 
having written to England that the commonwealth 
was " builded on rocks, sands, and salt marshes." 

VI. 

There is good authority for believing that a ri- 
valry between Hooker and Cotton had quite as much 
to do with the discontent as straitened boundaries 
and wiry marsh grass. Hooker was the greatest 
debater, perhaps, in the ranks of the Puritans. His 
theology was somewhat somber, his theory of 
Christian experience of the most exigent type. 



Neiv England Dispersions. 



321 



To be saved, according to Hooker, one must be- 
come so passive as to be willing to be eternally 
damned. In other regards he was a Puritan of a 
rather more primitive type than Cotton. He knew 
no satisfactory evidence of a man's acceptance with 
God but his good works. Cotton was less logical 
but more attractive. His Puritanism grew in a gar- 
den of spices. He delighted in allegorical interpre- 
tations of the Canticles, his severe doctrines were 
dulcified with sentiment, and his conception of the 
inward Christian life was more joyous and mystical 
and less legal and severe than Hooker's. He was 
an adept in the windings of non-committal expres- 
sion, and his intellectual sinuosity was a resource 
in debate or difficulty. Hooker, on the other hand, 
had a downrightness not to be mistaken. With 
an advantage in temperament and the additional 
advantage of position in the commercial and po- 
litical center, it is not surprising that Cotton's 
ideals eloquently and deftly presented soon domi- 
nated the colony and that he became the Delphic 
oracle whose utterances were awaited by the rulers 
in emergencies. 

Theological differences were early apparent in 
the teachings of the two leaders. Trivial enough 
to the modern mind are these questions concerning 
works as an evidence of justification and concern- 
ing active and passive faith in justification. Hook- 
er maintained all by himself that there was " a 
saving preparation in a Christian soule before un- 
yon with Christ." The other ministers pretended 



Chap. III. 

Compare 

Walker's 

First 

Church of 

Hartford, 

129-132. 



Theologi- 
cal differ- 
ences. 



Note I. 



322 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 2. 



Attrac- 
tions of 
Connecti- 
cut, 



to understand what he meant by this, and at first 
opposed him unanimously. No doubt, too, Hooker 
and his disciples found some fault with the outer 
form of the church as shaped by Cotton. Certain 
it is that Hooker's theories of civil government 
were more libei-al and modern than Cotton's, 
though like Cotton's they were hung upon texts of 
Scripture. Hooker lacked Cotton's superfluity of 
ingenuity ; he had less imagination and less poetic 
sentiment than Cotton, but his intellect was more 
rugged, practical, and virile. He was not a man 
to have visions of apolitical paradise; he did not 
attempt to limit citizenship to church members 
when he framed a constitution for the Connecticut 
towns. Nor did he give so much power and privi- 
lege to the magistrate as was given in Massachu- 
setts. He disapproved of Cotton's aristocratic the- 
ory of the permanence of the magistrate's office, as 
he did apparently of the negative vote of the upper 
house and of the arbitrary decisions which the Mas- 
sachusetts magistrates assumed the right to make. 

VII. 

One other potent motive there was. Stories of 
the fertility of the " intervale " land on the Con- 
necticut River came by the mouth of every daring 
adventurer who had sailed or tramped so far. 
There one might find pasture for the priceless 
cattle and hay to last the long winter through, and 
in that valley one might cultivate plains of great 
fertility. 



Neiv England Dispersions. 



323 



VIII. 

There were dangerous Pequots on the Con- 
necticut, it is true, and the Dutch had already 
planted a trading house and laid claim to the ter- 
ritory. The Plymouth people who traded there 
were also claimants. And, more than all, leaving 
Massachusetts in a time of danger from the machi- 
nations of Laud would seem desertion. The gov- 
ernment of the Massachusetts Bay colony was 
anomalous ; it partook of the character of the com- 
mercial company from which it sprang, yet it had 
traits of a religious or at least a voluntary society. 
It was the accepted opinion that those who had 
taken the freeman's oath were " knit " together 
" in one body," and that none of them ought to 
leave the colony without permission. Hooker's 
party gained the consent of a majority of the rep- 
resentative members of the General Court, but not 
of a majority of the assistants. This precipitated 
a debate in the colony on the constitutional ques- 
tion of the right of the assistants, or magistrates, to 
form an upper house and veto a decision of the 
chosen deputies of the towns. 

IX. 

It is no part of our purpose to unravel the tan- 
gle of ecclesiastical and civil politics in which the 
proposed emigration had now become involved. 
The Dorchester church and a part of that of Water- 
town v/ere ready to follow the lead of Hooker and 



Chap. III. 



Obstacles 
to remov- 
al. 



Savage's 
Winthrop, 
i, 167, 168. 



Attempts 
to prevent 
removal. 



3^4 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Explorers 
and pio- 
neers. 



'i^^2>i- 



Newtown. Days of fasting and prayer w^ere ap- 
pointed to prevent the removal of these "candle, 
sticks," as the churches were called, out of their 
places; but in spite of humiliations and of Cotton's 
persuasive eloquence, which at one time almost 
charmed away the discontent, the emigration set 
in, stragglingly at first, 

John Oldham, an adventurous man of a rather 
lawless temper — one of those half-ruffians that are 
most serviceable on an Indian frontier — had been 
expelled from Plymouth. He was now a resident 
of Watertown, one of the centers of discontent and 
next neighbor to Newtown. He had gone with 
three others on a trading expedition to the west- 
ward overland. Walking along trails from one 
Indian village to another they discovered a large 
river, which they found to be the Fresh River of 
the Dutch and the Connecticut of the Plymouth 
traders. They probably brought back to Water- 
town accounts that produced a fever for removal, 
Oldham was not a man to stand on the manner of 
his emigration. Waiting for nobody's consent, he 
led out a small company from Watertown the next 
year. These settled at what is now Wethersfield. 
From Dorchester, which had no alewife fishery 
with which to enrich its fields, settlers removed in 
1634 to the Connecticut, where the soil did not 
need to be "fished." In 1635 the number of emi- 
grants was larger, and there was much suffering 
during the following winter and many of the cattle 
perished. 



Neiv England Dispersions. 



325 



X. 

But the unit of New England migration was the 
church. No doubt the cohesiveness of the town- 
ships, and of the churches which were the nuclei of 
the towns, was re-enforced by provincial differences 
between the several communities. In 1636 Hooker, 
the real founder of Connecticut, and his congrega- 
tion of Essex people, sold their houses and mead- 
ows and home lots and acre rights in the com- 
monage in Cambridge to a new congregation led 
by Thomas Shepard. From Newtown and from 
Dorchester the churches emigrated bodily— pas- 
tors, teachers, ruling elders, and deacons — carrying 
their organization with them through the wilder- 
ness like an ark of the covenant. New churches 
were soon afterward formed in the places they 
had left. Naturally, town government became the 
principal feature of civil organization in states thus 
planted by separate and coherent groups. 

XI. 

The Connecticut rulers acted at first as a gov- 
ernment subordinate to Massachusetts ; but the set- 
tlements, except that of people from Roxbury at 
Springfield, were south of the line of the Massa- 
chusetts colony, and it was not in the nature of 
things that Hooker and Haynes should subordinate 
themselves to Cotton and Winthrop. There was 
indeed no little exasperation between the two col- 
onies. An independent constitution was adopted 



Chap. III. 



Emigra- 
tion by 
churclies. 



1636. 



Note 3, 



The new 
govern- 
ment. 



326 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Conn. 
Hist. Soc. 
Coll., i, 20, 



Conn. 
Hist. Soc. 
Coll., i, 3, 
andff. 



Instability 
of a the- 
ocracy. 



in Connecticut, on principles which Hooker thought 
he found in the first chapter of Deuteronomy, and 
which were not exactly those that Cotton had man- 
aged to deduce from Scripture in his Model of 
Moses his Judicials. The Massachusetts people, 
whose government aspired to dominate all New 
England, seem to have been angered by Hooker's 
secession and by his refusal to subordinate the new 
state to their own. ISIassachusetts asserted its au- 
thority over Springfield, which was within its lim- 
its, and every effort possible was made to prevent 
new emigrants who landed at Boston from going 
to the west. Even in England accounts adverse to 
Connecticut were circulated. Hooker, the real 
head of the new state, resented this in a letter of 
great vigor and some passion. 

XII. 

In its early years Massachusetts had no rest. 
Three profound disturbances — the expulsion of 
Williams, the secession of Hooker and his follow- 
ers, and the Hutchinsonian convulsion — followed 
one another in breathless succession, and a danger- 
ous Indian war ran its course at the same time. 
That the early settlements were founded on 
" rocks and sands and salt marshes " was not the 
chief misfortune of the Bay colony. Its ecclesi- 
astical politics proved explosive, to the consterna- 
tion of its pious founders, who like other settlers 
in Utopia had neglected to reckon with human 
nature. 



New England Dispersions. 



327 



XIII. 

It has been the habit of modern writers on the 
subject to dismiss the Hutchinsonian controversy 
as a debate about meaningless propositions in an 
incomprehensible jargon. Yet there was in it but 
the action of well-known tendencies in human na- 
ture which might almost have been predicted from 
the antecedent circumstances. Puritanism had 
wrapped itself in the haircloth of austerity, it took 
grim delight in harsh forbiddings, and heaped up 
whole decalogues of thou-shalt-nots. Nor did it 
offer, as other intense religious movements have 
done, the compensation of internal joys for the 
gayety it repressed. Theoretically Calvinist, it was 
practically an ascetic system of external duties and 
abstentions, trampling on the human spirit without 
ruth. 

But the heart will not be perpetually repressed ; 
kept from natural pleasures, it will seek supernatu- 
ral delights. Men were certain sooner or later to 
soften the ii'on rigidity of Puritanism by cultivating 
those subjective joys for which Calvinism provided 
abundant materials. While preachers like Hooker 
were scourging the soul into a self-abasement that 
could approve its own damnation, and while in- 
genious scribes were amassing additional burdens 
of scruple for heavy-laden shoulders, there arose in 
England a new school of Puritan pietists. These 
shirked none of the requirements of the legalists, 
but their spirits sought the sunnier nooks of Calvin- 



Chap. III. 



Severity 
of Puri- 
tanism. 



Reaction 
toward a 
subjective 
joyous- 
ness. 



32? 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Magnalia 
B. in, c, 
I. 32. 



Compare 
Cotton's 
Fountain 
of Life, 35. 



Note 4. 



Note 5. 



Sliepard's 
Memoirs 
in Young, 
505. 



ism, and they preached the joy of the elect and the 
delight of a fully assured faith. Cotton, whose fair 
complexion, brown hair, and ruddy countenance 
attested a sanguine temperament, belonged by na- 
ture to this new order. He rejoiced that he had 
received the " witness of the Spirit " on his wedding 
day, and he delighted to draw out Scripture im- 
agery to a surprising tenuity in describing the 
"covenant of marriage" and the intimacy of the 
" covenant of salt " or of friendship between God 
and the soul of the believer. Preachers of the 
same sort brought relief to multitudes in various 
towns of England. The people, tired of churchly 
routine on the one hand and of legalism on the 
other, thronged to hear such divines " filling the 
doores and windows." It was the evangelicalism 
of the following century sending up its shoots 
prematurely into a frosty air. The old-fashioned 
Puritan had always conceived of religion as diffi- 
cult of attainment. It was a paradoxical system 
wherein men were saved by the works they the- 
oretically abjured. Conservative Puritans com- 
plained of the preachers who spread a table of 
" dainties," as though it were meritorious to sustain 
the soul on a rugged diet of rough doctrine. In 
Thomas Shepard's Memoirs of his own Life we 
may overhear "a godly company" of the time in 
familiar " discourse about the wrath of God and the 
terror of it, and how intolerable it was ; which they 
did present by fire, how intolerable the torment of 
that was for a time ; what, then, would eternity be ? " 



Neiv England Dispersions. 



3^9 



XIV. 

Cotton professed that he loved to sweeten his 
mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went to 
sleep. His emotional rendering of Calvinistic doc- 
trines wrought strongly on the people of the new 
Boston, and his advent was followed by widespread 
religious excitement. More people were admitted 
to the church in Boston in the earlier months of 
Cotton's residence than to all the other churches in 
the colony. Boston seems to have become religious 
in a pervasive way, and in 1635 measures were 
taken to prevent persons who were not likely to 
unite with the church from settling in the town. 
In this community, which had no intellectual in- 
terest but religion, and from which ordinary di- 
versions were banished, there were sermons on 
Sunday and religious lectures on week days and 
ever-recurring meetings in private houses. The 
religious pressure was raised to the danger point, 
and an explosion of some sort was well-nigh inevi- 
table. Cotton's enthusiasms were modulated by 
the soft stop of a naturally placid temper, but 
when communicated to others they were more dan- 
gerous. 

XV. 

Mrs. Anne Hutchinson had been one of Cotton's 
ardent disciples in old Boston. She crossed the 
sea with her husband that she might sit under 
his ministry in New England. She was a woman 



Chap. III. 



Cotton's 
revival- 
ism. 



Win- 
throp's 
Journal, i, 
144- 



Report of 

Record 

Com. ii, 5. 

Boston 

Town 

Records, 

1635- 
Hutchin- 
son Papers, 
p. 88. 



Mrs. 

Hutchin- 
son's char- 
acter. 



330 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Plant i^ig. 



Book III. 



Wonder- 
working 
Provi- 
dence, ch. 
Ixii. 

Note 6. 



Short 
Story, etc. 
P- 31- 



Cotton's 
The Way 
of the 
Churches 
Cleared, 
Part I, 

P- 51- 
Short 
Story, 31. 



Short 
Story, 34. 



cursed with a natural gift for leadership in an age 
that had no place for such women. " This Master- 
piece of Womens wit," the railing Captain Johnson 
calls her, and certainly her answers before the Mas- 
sachusetts General Court go to show that she was 
not inferior in cleverness to any of the magistrates 
or ministers. Winthrop, whose antipathy to her 
was a passion, speaks of her " sober and profitable 
carriage," and sa3's that she was " very helpful in 
the time of childbirth and other occasions of bodily 
infirmities, and well furnished with means to those 
purposes." In the state of medical science at that 
time such intelligent and voluntary ministration 
from a "gentlewoman" must have been highly val- 
ued. Almost alone of the religionists of her time 
she translated her devotion into philanthropic exer- 
tion. But a woman of her " nimble and active wit " 
could not pass her life in bodily ministrations. 
Power seeks expression, and her native eloquence 
was sure to find opportunity. Mrs. Hutchinson 
made use of the usual gathering of gossips on the 
occasion of childbirth to persuade the women to 
that more intimate religious life of which she was 
an advocate. It was the custom to hold devotion 
at concert pitch by meetings at private houses for 
men only ; women might be edified by their hus- 
bands at home. Mrs. Hutchinson ventured to open 
a little meeting for women. This was highly ap- 
proved at first, and grew to unexpected dimensions ; 
fifty, and sometimes eighty, of the principal women 
of the little town were present at her conferences. 



New England Dispersions. 



331 



XVI. 

In these meetings she emphasized Cotton's favor- 
ite doctrine of " a covenant of grace." Her sensi- 
tive woman's nature no doubt had beat its wings 
against the bars of legalism. She was not a phi- 
losopher, but nothing could be more truly in accord 
with the philosophy of character than her desire to 
give to conduct a greater spontaneity. Cotton him- 
self preached in the same vein. In addition to the 
Reformation, of which Puritans made so much, he 
looked for something more which he called, in the 
phrase of the Apocalypse, " the first resurrection." 
Mrs. Hutchinson, who was less prudent and more 
virile than Cotton, did not hesitate to describe 
most of the ministers in the colony as halting under 
a " covenant of works." Her doctrine was, at bot- 
tom, an insurrection against the vexatious legalism 
of Puritanism. She carried her rebellion so far 
that she would not even admit that good works 
were a necessary evidence of conversion. It was 
the particular imbecility of the age that thought of 
almost every sort must spin a cocoon of theolog- 
ical phrases for itself. Spontaneity of religious 
and moral action represented itself to Mrs. Hutch- 
inson and her followers as an indwelling of the 
Holy Ghost in the believer and as a personal union 
with Christ whom they identified with the " new 
creature " of Paul. Such a hardening of metaphor 
into dogma is one of the commonest phenomena 
of religious thought. 



Chap. III. 



Mrs. 

Hutchin- 
son's doc- 
trines. 

Compare 
Whele- 
wright's 
Sermon in 
Proc. Mass. 
Hist. Soc, 
1S66, 265. 
Cotton's 
Sermon 
on the 
Churches 
Resurrec- 
tion, 1642. 



332 



Centrifugal Foj-ccs in Colony-Plantijig. 



Book III. 



Vane's ar- 
rival, 1635. 



His elec- 
tion as 
governor, 
1636. 



XVII. 

Sir Henry Vane the younger, who had become 
an ardent Puritan in spite of his father, landed in 
Boston in October, 1635. He had already- shown 
those gifts which enabled him afterward to play a 
considerable part in English history. His high 
connections made him an interesting figure, and 
though only about twenty-six years of age he was 
chosen governor in May, 1636. Ardent by nature, 
and yet in his youth when he " forsook the honors 
and preferments of the court to enjoy the ordi- 
nances of Christ in their purity," nothing was more 
natural than that he should be captivated by the 
seraphic Cotton and that he should easily adopt 
the transcendental views of Mrs. Hutchinson. 
Winthrop, the natural leader of the colony, having 
given place in 1635 to Haynes, perhaps in order 
that Hooker's party might be conciliated and the 
Connecticut emigration avoided, was a second time 
thrust aside that a high-born 3'outh might be hon- 
ored. Winthrop was utterly opposed to Mrs. 
Hutchinson, in whose teachings his apprehensive 
spirit saw full-fledged Antinomianism, and, by in- 
ference, potential anabaptism, blasphemy, and sedi- 
tion. The Hutchinsonians were partisans of Vane, 
who adhered to their doctrine. The ministers other 
than Cotton and Whelewright, stung b}^ the impu- 
tation that they were under "a covenant of works," 
rallied about Winthrop. Political cleavage and re- 
ligious division unfortunately coincided. 



Nezo England Dispersions. 



O '? T 

000 



XVIII. 

Supported by the prestige of the )^oung gov- 
ernor and of some conspicuous citizens and inspired 
by Cotton's metaphorical and mystical preaching, 
which was interpreted with latitude, the enthusi- 
asm of the Hutchinsonians tended to become fanat- 
icism. We have to depend mainly on the preju- 
diced account of their enemies, but there is little 
reason to doubt that the advocates of " a covenant 
of grace " assumed the airs of superiority usually 
seen in those who have discovered a short cut to 
perfection. The human spirit knows few greater 
consolations than well-disguised self-righteousness. 
The followers of Mrs. Hutchinson, if we may be- 
lieve the witnesses, sometimes showed their sanctity 
by walking out of meeting when a preacher not 
under " a covenant of grace " entered the pulpit. 
They even interrupted the services with controver- 
sial questions addressed to the minister. Wilson, 
pastor of the Boston church, was condemned by 
them as being under " a covenant of works," and 
also incidentally criticised for his " thick utter- 
ance." Nor can one find that Cotton interposed 
his authority to protect his less gifted colleague. 
It is quite conceivable that he looked with some 
satisfaction on the progress of affairs in Boston. 
The heavenly minded young governor who had 
chosen to suffer reproach with the people of God 
was his disciple. The brilliant woman who was 
easily the leader of the town was the very apostle 



Chap. III. 



Arrogance 
of the 
Hutchin- 
son party. 



1636. 



334 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Cotton's 
Churches 
Resurrec- 
tion, p. 27, 



Bitterness 
of the de- 
bate. 



of his doctrine. The superiority of his opinions 
on a union with Christ that preceded active faith 
as compared with those of Hooker and the lesser 
divines was enthusiastically asserted by the great 
majority of the Boston church, led by Mrs. Hutch- 
inson. Seeing so much zeal and sound doctrine he 
may have felt that the first or spiritual resurrection 
of which he was wont to prophesy from the Apoca- 
lypse, had already begun in his own congregation, 
and that among these enthusiasts were those w^ho 
had learned to " buy so as though they bought 
not " — those who had been lifted into a crystalline 
sphere where they had " the Moone under their 
feet. And if we have the Moone under our feete, 
then wee are not eclipsed when the Moone is 
Eclipsed." Thus did Cotton's imagination revel 
in cosmical imagery. 

XIX. 

The arrogance of the elect is hard to bear, and 
it is not wonderful that the debate waxed hot. 
The concentrated religiousness of a town that 
sought to shut out unbelieving residents made the 
dispute dangerous. In the rising tempest a ballast 
of ungodly people might have been serviceable. 
But in Boston there were few even of the indiffer- 
ent to be buffers in the religious collision. While 
the covenant-of-grace people made themselves of- 
fensive, their opponents, — Winthrop, the slighted 
ex-governor, Wilson, the unpopular pastor, and the 
ministers accused of being- under a covenant of 



New England Dispersions. 



335 



works — resorted to the favorite weapons of po- ^^^' 
lemics. They hatched a brood of inferences from 
the opinions Mrs. Hutchinson held, or was thought 
to hold, and then made her responsible for the 
ugly bantlings. They pretended to believe, and 
no doubt did believe, that Mrs. Hutchinson's eso- 
teric teaching was worse than what she gave out. 
They borrowed the names of ancient heresies, long 
damned by common consent, to give odium to her 
doctrine. That the new party should be called An- 
tinomian was plausible ; the road they had chosen 
for escape from Puritan legalism certainly lay in 
that direction. But Antinomianism had suffered 
from an imputation of immorality, and no such 
tendency was apparent, unless by logical deduc- 
tion, in the doctrines taught in Boston. The hear- 
ers of Mrs. Hutchinson were also accused of hav- 
ing accepted the doctrines of the so-called Family 
of Love which had of old been accused of many 
detestable things, and was a common bugaboo of 
theolog}^ at the time. The whole town of Boston 
and the whole colony of Massachusetts was set in 
commotion by the rude theological brawl. Such 
was the state of combustion in Boston that it was 
thought necessary b}^ the opponents of Vane and 
Mrs. Hutchinson to hold the court of elections at 
the former capital, Newtown. The excitement at 
this court was so great that the church members, 
who only could vote, were on the point of laying 
violent hands on one another in a contest growing 
out of a question relating to the indwelling of the 



Over- 
throw of 
Vane, 1637. 



336 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



The Synod 
of 1637. 



Short 

Story of 

the Rise, 

Reign, etc. , 

passim. 

Win- 

throp's 

Journal, i, 

284, and 

following. 

Cotton's 

Way of the 

Churches 

Cleared, 

passim. 



The perse- 
cution. 



Holy Ghost. Vane was defeated, and Winthrop 
again made governor. 

XX. 

A great synod of elders from all the New Eng- 
land churches was assembled. All the way from 
Ipswich and Newbury on the east and from the 
Connecticut on the west the " teaching elders " 
made their way by water or by land, at public ex- 
pense, that they might help the magistrates of Mas- 
sachusetts to decide on what they should compel 
the churches to believe. For more than three 
weeks the synod at Cambridge wrestled with the 
most abstruse points of doctrine. The governor 
frequently had to interpose to keep the peace ; 
sometimes he adjourned the assembly, to give time 
for heats to cool. A long list of errors, most of 
which were not held by anybody in particular, 
were condemned. A nearly unanimous conclusion 
on certain fine-spun doctrines was reached at length 
by means of affirmations couched in language 
vague or ambiguous. Cotton, who had been forced 
after debate to recant one opinion and modify 
others, assented to the inconclusive conclusions, 
but with characteristic non-committalism he quali- 
fied his assent and withheld his signature. 

XXI. 

The field was now cleared for the orderly per- 
secution of the dissentients. Whelewright, Mrs. 
Hutchinson's brother-in-law, had been convicted of 



Nczv England Dispersions. 



337 



sedition in the preceding March on account of an 
imprudent sermon preached on a fast day. But his 
sentence had been deferred from court to court, ap- 
parently until after the synod. At the November 
court following the synod Whelewright was ban- 
ished, and those who had signed a rather vigorous 
petition in his favor many long months before were 
arraigned and banished or otherwise punished. 
The banished included some of the most intelligent 
and conspicuous residents. Not until this Novem- 
ber court had her opponents ventured to bring 
Mrs. Hutchinson to trial. Whelewright, standing 
by his hot-headed sermon, had just been sentenced ; 
the abler but more timid Cotton had already been 
overborne and driven into a safe ambiguity by the 
tremendous pressure of the great synod. Vane 
had left the colony, and the time was ripe to finish 
the work of extirpation. The elders were sum- 
moned to be present and advise. 

XXII. 

During a two days* trial, conducted inquisitori- 
ally, like an English Court of High Commission, 
Cambridge presented the spectacle of a high-spir- 
ited and gifted woman, at the worst but a victim 
of enthusiasm, badgered by the court and by the 
ministers, whose dominant order she had attacked. 
Cotton, with more than his usual courage, stood 
her defender. The tough-fibered Hugh Peter, who 
made himself conspicuous in several ways, took it 

on him to rebuke Cotton for saying a word in de- 
23 



Chap. III. 



Mass. Rec, 
i, 207. 



Mrs. 

Hutchin- 
son's trial, 
1637. 



Hutchin- 
son's Hist, 
of Mass. 
Bay, ii, 
appendix. 



338 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 
Note 7. 



fense of the accused, Endecott and Hugh Peter, 
mates well matched, browbeat the witnesses who 
appeared in Mrs. Hutchinson's behalf, and Dudley, 
the conscientious advocate of persecution, was 
rude and overbearing. Winthrop acted as chief 
inquisitor, the narrow sincerity and superstition of 
his nature obscuring the nobler qualities of the 
man. 

Mrs. Hutchinson defended herself adroitly at 
first, refusing to be trapped into self-condemnation. 
But her natural part was that of an outspoken agi- 
tator, and her religious exaltation had been in- 
creased, doubtless, by persecution, for combative- 
ness is a stimulant even to zeal. On the second 
day she threw away " the fear of man," and de- 
clared that she had an inward assurance of her de- 
liverance, adding that the General Court would 
suffer disaster. For this prophesying she was 
promptly condemned. Cotton had prophesied 
notably on one occasion, Wilson, his colleague, was 
given to rhyming prophecies, and Hooker had 
made a solemn prediction while in Holland. In 
this very year the plan of the Pequot campaign had 
been radically changed in compliance with a reve- 
lation vouchsafed to the chaplain. Stone. But these 
were ministers, and never was the ministerial office 
so reverenced as by the Puritans, who professed to 
strip it of every outward attribute of priestliness. 
Above all, for a woman to teach and to have 
revelations was to stand the world on its head. 
" We do not mean to discourse with those of your 



New England Dispersions. 



339 



sex," etc., said Winthrop severely to Mrs. Hutchin- 
son during the trial. She was sentenced to ban- 
ishment, but reprieved, that the church might deal 
with her. On the persuasion of Cotton and others, 
Mrs. Hutchinson wrote a recantation apologizing 
for her assumption to have revelations, and retract- 
ing certain opinions of which she had been accused. 
But she added that she had never intended to 
teach or to hold these opinions. For this false- 
hood, as it was deemed, she was summarily excom- 
municated. Yet nothing seems more probable than 
that her hyperbolic utterances under excitement 
had not stood for dogmatic opinions. Under Cot- 
ton's fine-spun system of church government a 
member could not be excommunicated except by 
unanimous consent. Many of Mrs. Hutchinson's 
friends were absent from the colony, others had 
prudently changed sides or stayed away from the 
meeting. But her sons ventured to speak in her 
behalf. Cotton at once admonished them. The 
effect of putting them under admonition was to dis- 
franchise them ; it was one of Cotton's ingenuities 
of the sanctuary. The sons out of the way, the 
mother was cast out unanimously — a punishment 
much dreaded among the Puritans, who believed 
that what was thus bound on earth was bound in 
heaven. It was a ban that forbade the faithful 
even to eat with her. But the melancholy under 
which Mrs. Hutchinson had suffered vanished at 
once, and she said as she left the church assembly, 
" Better to be cast out than to deny Christ." 



Chap. III. 

Mrs. 

Hutchin- 
son is ex- 
communi- 
cated. 



Note 8. 



Rise, 
Reign, 
Ruine, etc., 
and Win- 
throp's 
Journal, i, 
309. 310- 



340 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Omens 
and augu- 
ries. 



Savage's 
Win- 
throp's 
Journal, i, 
313, 316; 
ii, II, and 
Short 
Story of 
Rise and 
Reign of 
Antino- 
mianism. 



Winthrop, 
i, 316. 



XXIII, 

Mrs. Hutchinson and most of her party settled 
on Rhode Island, where they sheltered themselves 
at first in caves dug in the ground. Here she 
again attracted attention by the charm of her elo- 
quent teaching, and some came from afar to hear 
the " she Gamaliel," as her opponents called her. 
Such gifts in a woman, and in one who had been 
excommunicated by the authority vested in the 
church, could be accounted for only by attributing 
her power to sorcery. Winthrop sets down the 
evidence that she was a witch, wdiich consisted in 
her frequent association with Jane Hawkins, the 
midwife, who sold oil of mandrakes to cure bar- 
renness, and who was known to be familiar with 
the devil. At length " God stepped in," and by 
his " casting voice " proved which side was right. 
Mary Dyer, one of the women who followed Mrs. 
Hutchinson, had given birth to a deformed still- 
born child. This fact became known when Mrs. 
Dyer left the church with the excommunicated 
Mrs. Hutchinson. Winthrop had the monstrosity 
exhumed after long burial had rendered its traits 
difficult to distinguish. He examined it person- 
ally with little result, but he published in England 
incredible midwife's tales about it. God stepped 
in once more, and Mrs. Hutchinson herself, after 
she went to Rhode Island, suffered a maternal mis- 
fortune of another kind. The wild reports that 
were circulated regarding this event are not fit to 



Nnv England Dispersions. 



341 



be printed even in a note ; the first editor of Win- 
throp's journal felt obliged to render the words 
into Latin in order that scholars might read them 
shamefacedly. But Cotton, who was by this time 
redeeming himself by a belated zeal against the 
banished sectaries, repeated the impossible tale, 
which was far worse than pathological, to men and 
women, callow youths, young maidens, and inno- 
cent children " in the open assembly at Boston on 
a lecture day," explaining the divine intent to sig- 
nalize her error in denying inherent righteousness. 
The governor, who was more cautious, wrote to 
the physician and got a correct report, from which 
the divine purpose was not so evident, and Cotton 
made a retraction at the next lecture. We are 
now peering into the abyss of seventeenth-century 
credulity. Here are a grave ruler and a di- 
vine once eminent at the university, and now 
renowned in England and in America, wallowing 
in a squalid superstition in comparison with which 
the divination of a Roman haruspex is dignified. 

Having suffered the loss of her husband, and 
hearing of efforts on the part of Massachusetts to 
annex Rhode Island, Mrs. Hutchinson removed to 
the Dutch colony of New Netherland with her 
family. Here she and all her household except 
one child were massacred by the Indians. This 
act of Providence was hailed as a final refutation 
of her errors, the more striking that the place 
where she suffered was not far removed from a 
place called Hell Gate. 



Chap. III. 



Savage's 
Winthrop, 
i, 326. 



Death of 
Mrs. 

Hutchin- 
son. 



Note 9. 



342 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Results of 
ecclesias- 
tical gov- 
ernment. 



XXIV. 

This famous controversy lets in much light up- 
on the character of the age and the nature of Puri- 
tanism. It is one of many incidents that reveal the 
impracticability of the religious Utopia attempted 
in New England. The concentration of religious 
people undoubtedly produced a community free 
from the kind of disorders that are otherwise in- 
separable from a pioneer state and that were found 
abundantly in New Netherland, in Maryland, and in 
Virginia and on the eastward fishing coast. " These 
English live soberly," said a Dutch visitor to Hart- 
ford in 1639, "drinking but three times at a meal, 
and when a man drinks to drunkenness they tie 
him to a post and whip him as they do thieves in 
Holland." But while some of the good results to 
be looked for in an exclusively Puritan community 
were attained, it was at the cost of exaggerating 
the tendency to debate and fanaticism and develop- 
ing the severity, the intolerance, and the meddle- 
some petty tyranny that inheres in an ecclesiastical 
system of government. During the lifetime of one 
generation Massachusetts suffered all these, and it is 
doubtful whether regularity of morals was not pur- 
chased at too great a sacrifice of liberty, bodily and 
spiritual, and of justice. Certainly the student of 
history views with relief the gradual relaxation 
that came after the English Restoration and the 
disappearance from the scene of the latest surviv- 
ors of the first generation of New England leaders. 



New England Dispersions. 



343 



XXV. 

During the period of the greatest excitement 
over the Hutchinson case John Davenport, a noted 
Puritan minister of London, had been in Massachu- 
setts. Like many other emigrant divines of the 
time he brought a migrant parish with him seek- 
ing a place to settle. Davenport arrived in June, 
1637, and took part against the Antinomians in 
the synod. After examining every place offered 
them in Massachusetts, he and his friends refused 
all and resolved to plant a new colony. The peo- 
ple were Londoners and bent on trade, and Massa- 
chusetts had no suitable place for their settlement 
left. The bitterness of the Hutchinson contro- 
versy may have had influence in bringing them to 
this decision, and the preparations of Laud to sub- 
ject and control Massachusetts perhaps had weight 
in driving them to seek a remoter settlement. 
Davenport had ideals of his own, and the earthly 
paradise he sought to found was not quite Cotton's 
nor was it Hooker's. He and his followers planted 
the New Haven colony in 1638. In this little colo- 
ny church and state were more completely blended 
than in Massachusetts. The government was by 
church members only, to the discontent of other 
residents, and in 1644 New Haven adopted the 
laws of Moses in all their rigor. The colony was 
united with Connecticut by royal charter at the 
Restoration, after which the saints no longer sat 
upon thrones judging the tribes of Israel. 



Chap. III. 



The New 

Haven 

colony. 



344 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Later 

English 
emigra- 
tions to 
New Eng- 
land. 



Lord May- 
nard to 
Laud, 
17 March, 
1638, in 
Sainsbury. 
Savage's 
Win- 
throp's 
Journal, i, 
319. 320, 
322. 

Rushworthj 
i, Part II, 
409, 718. 

Josselyn's 

Rarities, 

108. 

Cavalier 
emigra- 
tion to 
Virginia. 



Conclusion. 

The emigration to New England from the 
mother country was quickened by the troubles 
that preceded the civil war. In 1638 it reached 
its greatest height, having been augmented per- 
haps by agricultural distress. Fourteen ships 
bound for New England lay in the Thames at one 
time in the spring of that year. There was alarm 
at the great quantity of corn required for the 
emigrants, lest there should not be enough left 
in London to last till harvest. " Divers clothiers 
of great trading " resolved to " go suddenly," in 
which we may see, perhaps, evidence of bad times 
in the commercial world. Some parishes it was 
thought would be impoverished. Laud was asked 
to put a stop to the migration ; but the archbishop 
was busy trying to compel the Scots to use the 
prayer book. Most of the lords of the Council 
were favorable to New England; the customs offi- 
cers purposely neglected to search for contraband 
goods, and the ships, twenty in all, got away with 
or without license, and brought three thousand 
passengers to Boston. But the tide spent itself 
about this time, and by 1640 emigration to the 
New England colonies had entirely ceased. About 
twenty-one thousand two hundred people had been 
landed in all. 

The swing of the political pendulum in England 
that served to check the Puritan exodus gave im- 
petus to a new emigration to Virginia and Mary- 



Neiu England Dispersions. 



345 



land. During the ten j'ears and more before 1640 
few had gone to that region but bond servants. 
There were in that 3'ear not quite eight thousand 
people in Virginia. It is the point of time at which 
the native Virginians began to rear a second gen- 
eration born on the soil. The waning fortunes of 
the king sent to the colony in the following years 
a large cavalier emigration, and the average char- 
acter of the colonists was raised. Better ministers 
held the Virginia parishes and better order was 
observed in the courts. In 1648 four hundred 
emigrants lay aboard ships bound for Virginia at 
one time, and in 165 1 sixteen hundred royalist pris- 
oners seem to have been sent in one detachment. 

By the middle of the seventeenth century the 
English on the North American continent were in 
a fair way to predominate all other Europeans. 
From the rather lawless little fishing villages on 
the coast of Maine to the rigorous Puritan com- 
munes of the New Haven colony that stretched 
westward to pre-empt, in advance of the Dutch, 
land on the shores of Long Island Sound, the Eng- 
lish held New England. English settlers " seeking 
larger accommodations" had crossed to Long Is- 
land and were even pushing into the Dutch colony. 
The whole Chesapeake region was securely Eng- 
lish. Already there were Virginians about to 
break into the Carolina country lying wild between 
Virginia and the Spanish colony in Florida. The 
French and the Dutch and the Spaniards excelled 
the English in far-reaching explorations and adven- 



Chap. III. 



Petition to 
House of 
Lords, 15 
Aug., 1648. 
Royal Hist. 
MS., Com. 
Rept.. vii, 
45- 

Sainsbury, 
360. 

Prospec- 
tive as- 
cendency 
of the 
English 
colonies. 



346 



Ce7itrifiigal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note I, 
page 321. 



turous fur-trading-. But the English had proved 
their superior aptitude for planting compact agri- 
cultural communities. A sedentary and farming 
population where the supply of land is not limited 
reaches the highest rate of natural increase. At a 
later time, Franklin estimated that the population 
of the colonies doubled every twenty-five years 
without including immigrants. The compactness 
of English settlement and the prolific increase of 
English people decided the fate of North America. 
The rather thin shell of Dutch occupation was al- 
ready, by the middle of the seventeenth century, 
feeling the pressure under stress of which it was 
soon to give way. A century later collision with 
the populous and ever-multiplying English settle- 
ments brought about the collapse of the expanded 
bubble of New France. 

Elucidations. 

There is a paper on this debate in the British Record Office 
indorsed by Archbishop Laud, " Rec : Octob : 7. 1637," " Propo- 
sitions wch have devided Mr. Hooker & Mr. Cotton in Newe 
England, i. That a man may prove his justification by his works 
of sanctification, as the first, best, and only cheife evidence of his 
salvation. 2. Whither fayth be active or passive in justification. 
3. Whither there be any saving preparation in a Christian soule 
before his unyon with Christ. This latter is only Hooker's opin- 
ion, the rest of the ministers do not concurr with him : Cotton and 
the rest of the contrary opinion are against him and his party in 
all." Colonial Papers, ix, 71. In the next paper in the same 
volume, also indorsed by Laud, the controversy is more fully set 
forth. Copies of both are in the Bancroft collection of the New 
York Public Library, Laud indorsed these papers respectively 
October 7 and 15, 1637. The Cambridge Synod, which met Au- 
gust 30th, had adjourned late in September, and the debates 



New Engla7id Dispersions. 



347 



which divided the two divines must have preceded it, and perhaps 
preceded the migration of Hooker to Connecticut in 1636. When 
Haynes was Governor of Massachusetts he had pronounced the 
sentence of banishment against Williams. But some years later, 
while Governor of Connecticut, he relented a little and wrote to 
Williams : " I think, Mr. Williams, I must now confesse to you, 
that the most wise God hath provided and cut out this part of 
his world for a refuge and receptacle for all sorts of consciences. 
I am now under a cloud, and my brother Hooker, with the bay, as 
you have been, we have removed from them thus far, and yet they 
are not satisfied." Quoted by Williams in a letter to Mason, ist 
Massachusetts Historical Collections, i, 280. 

The abstract of Hooker's sermon of May 31, 1638, as de- 
ciphered and published by Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, is in the 
Collections of the Connecticut Historical Society, i, 20, 21, and 
the Fundamental Laws of 1639 ^^"^ '^i Hinman's Antiquities, 20, 
and ff., and in Trumbull's Blue Laws, 51. Compare also the 
remarkable letter of Hooker to Winthrop in Connecticut His- 
torical Society Collections, i, 3-15. Hooker objects strongly 
to the right of arbitrary decisions by the magistrate : " I must 
confess, I ever looked at it as a way which leads directly to 
tyranny, and so to confusion, and must plainly profess, if it was 
in my liberty, I would choose neither to live nor leave my poster- 
ity under such government." This letter exhibits Hooker's in- 
tellect to great advantage. One is inclined to rank him above 
most of his New England contemporaries in clearness and breadth 
of thought. 

The selling of half-developed homesteads to newcomers by 
older settlers was of constant occurrence in all the colonies dur- 
ing the colonial period. It was a notable practice on the frontiers 
of Pennsylvania down to the Revolution, and perhaps later. Hub- 
bard thus describes what went on in every New England settle- 
ment : " Thus the first planters in every township, having the 
advantage of the first discovery of places, removed themselves 
into new dwellings, thereby making room for others to succeed 
them in their old." General History of New England, 155. 

The existence in England of a doctrine resembling that of the 
followers of Cotton and Mrs. Hutchinson is implied in Welde's 
preface to the Short Stoiy of the Rise, Reign, and Ruine of An- 
tinomianism. " And this is the very reason that this kind of doc- 



Chap. III. 



Note 2, 
page 322. 



Note 3, 
page 325. 



Note 4, 
page 328. 



^ 



348 



Centrifugal Forces in Colony-Planting. 



Book III. 



Note 5, 
pa^e 328. 



Note 6, 
page 330. 



Note 7, 
page 338. 



Note 8, 
page 338. 



trine takes so well here in London and other parts of the king- 
dome, and that you see so many dance after this pipe, running 
after such and such, crowding the Churches and filling the 
doores and windowes." 

Giles Firmin's Review of Davis's Vindication, 1693, quotes 
from a letter of Shepard of Cambridge, Massachusetts : " Preach 
Humiliation, labor to possess Men with a Sence of Misery and 
wrath to come. The Gospel Consolations and Grace which 
some would have only disht out as the Dainties of the times and 
set upon the Ministry's Table may possibly tickle and ravish 
some and do some good to some which are Humbled and Con- 
verted already. But if Axes and Wedges be not used withal to 
hew and break this rough unhewn bold but professing age, I am 
Confident the Work and Fruit . . . will be but meer Hypocrisie." 

Notwithstanding his early imprudence during the partisan ex- 
citement in Boston, Whelewright was a man of sound judgment, 
and his testimony regarding his sister-in-law is the most impor- 
tant we have. " She was a woman of good wit and not onely 
so, . . . but naturally of a good judgment too, as appeared in her 
civiU occasions ; In spirituals indeed she gave her understanding 
over into the power of suggestion and immediate dictates, by 
reason of which she had many strange fancies, and erroneous 
tenents possest her, especially during her confinement ... at- 
tended by melancholy." Mercurius Americanus, p. 7. 

Hugh Peter, after his return to England, adopted the views 
in favor of toleration beginning to prevail there. Nine years 
after he had obtruded himself so eagerly to testify against Mrs. 
Hutchinson, he was writing to New England earnest remon- 
strances against persecution. 4 Massachusetts Historical Collec- 
tions, vi, where the letters are given. 

There were those who wished to give time for a second ad- 
monition before excommunication, but they were overruled, prob- 
ably by Wilson. Winthrop, i, 310. It would, perhaps, have 
been in better form to take the other and less eager course. 
There is a Latin paper in the British Public Record Office, dated 
3 March, 1635, which professes to give a brief and orderly digest 
of the canons of government constituted and observed in the re- 
formed New England churches. I am unable to trace its au- 
thority. From this I quote ; " Qui pertinacitur consistorii admo- 
nitiones rejecerit a coena domini suspendatur. Si suspensus, post 



New England Dispersions. 



349 



iteratus admonitiones nulla poenitentiaj signum dederit ad ex- 
comunicationem procedat Ecclesia." 

It would be a waste of time to controvert the ingenious apolo- 
gies which have been written to prove that an inexorable necessity 
compelled the banishment of the Antinomians. The Massachu- 
setts government was in its very nature and theory opposed to 
religious toleration, as we may see by the reference of the case of 
Gorton and his companions to the elders, and their verdict that 
these men, not residents of the jurisdiction, ought to be put to 
death for constructive blasphemy, a decision that the magis- 
trates by a majority vote would have put in execution if the 
"deputies" or representative members of the assembly had not 
dissented. Savage's Winthrop's Journal, ii, 177. The doctrine 
of intolerance is ingeniously set forth in Cotton's " The Powring 
Ovt of the Seven Vials, . . . very fit and necessary for this Pres- 
ent Age," published in 1643. Cotton compares Jesuits and here- 
tics to wolves, and says, " Is it not an acceptable service to the 
whole Country to cut off the ravening Wolves ? " The Puritans 
of New England from their very circumstances were slower to 
accept the doctrine of religious liberty than their coreligionists in 
England. 



Chap. III. 



Note 9, 
page 341. 



INDEX 



Abbot, Abp., on Calvert's resignation, 
259, n. 6. 

Abercromby's Examination, 258, n. 4 ; 
262, n. II ; 263, n. 12. 

Aberdeen Burgh Records, no Sabba- 
tarian legislation in, 140, n. 12 ; 
quaint ordinance from, 140, n. 12. 

Accidents, New England hung on a 
chain of slender, 176. 

Act, for Church Liberties, 1639, 251 ; 
265, n. 22 ; for discovering popish 
recusants, 237, m. ; of Toleration, 
1649, 255, 256 ; act to prevent, etc., 
237, m. 

Activity, intellectual, men excited to 
unwonted, i. 

Adam's needle and thread, garments 
woven of fiber of, 79 ; efforts to 
cultivate, 80. 

Admonition to the People of Eng- 
land, 115, m. 

Advertisements for Planters of New 
England, 27, m. 

Age of romance and adventure, an, 
I, 20 ; of colony beginnings, 92 ; 
dramatic and poetic to its core, 
100. 

Agrarian and industrial disturbance 
aids the Puritan movement, ill. 

Ainsworth wrote tractate on the Jew- 
ish ephod, loS. 

Alexander, William, Encouragement 
to Colonies, 258, n. 3. 

Alleghanies deemed almost impass- 
able, II. 

Almond, an, for a Parrat, 116. 

America excited the most lively curi- 
osity, 2 ; notion that it was an Asi- 
atic peninsula, 3 ; search for a route 
through, lasted one hundred and 
fourteen years, 8; a Mediterranean 
Sea sought in the heart of, 11; fact 
and fable about, 14 ; excepted from 
the Deluge, 20 ; treasure from flow- 
ing into Spanish coffers, 74 ; Hak- 



luyt spreading sails for, in every 
breeze, 76 ; all one to European 
eyes, 169. 

Amer. Antiqu. Soc. Trans, 22, n. 4. 

Amsterdam, Separatists migrated to, 
148 ; called a common harbor of 
all opinions, 164. 

Anabaptism, divergencies in direction 
of, in Mass., 267. 

Anarchy and despotism the inevitable 
alternatives of communism, 26. 

Anderson's Church of England in the 
Colonies, 258, n. 3. 

Anderson's Commerce, 22, n. 5 ; 75, 
m. ; 76, m. ; 95, n. 3. 

Anglican and Puritan party lines not 
sharply drawn at first, no. 

Anglican Church party, leaders at 
Zurich and Strasburg, 104 ; held 
to the antique ritual, 106 ; content 
with moderate reforms, 109 ; must 
have a stately liturgy and holy days, 
no ; becomes dogmatic, 113 ; aided 
by Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, 
122. 

Anglican zeal founded a nation of 
dissenters, 91. 

Animals, notions about American, 
18 ; too many kinds for Noah's 
ark, 20. 

Animals for breeding, stock of, 48 ; 
sold by Argall, 50. 

Antinomianism, divergencies in di- 
rection of, in Mass., 287 ; found by 
Winthrop in Mrs. Hutchinson's 
teachings, 332. 

Antinomians sheltered by Vane and 
Cotton, 267 ; Davenport took part 
against, in the synod, 343 ; banish- 
ment of the, 349, n. 9. See also 
Hutchinson, Mrs. Anne, and 

HUTCHINSONIAN CONTROVERSY. 

Antwerp, a place of refuge for the 

persecuted, 312, n. 18. 
Apocalypse of John, the, received 



351 



352 



The Bcg'umcrs of a Nation. 



hearty consideration from the New 
England Puritans, 301. 

Apostolic primitivism, aim of the 
Puritan, 303 ; goal of the Separa- 
tist, 303. 

Apostolic succession asserted as essen- 
tial, 113. 

Archdale's Carolina, 171, m. 

Archer, Gabriel, wounded by the In- 
dians, 28 ; hostile to Smith, 37 ; 
character of, 64, n. 3 ; a ringleader 
in disorders, 63, n. 3 ; a paper on 
Virginia by, 96, n. 7. 

Archery on Sunday prohibited, 127. 

Arctic continent, an, 2. 

Argall, Captain, the first Englishman 
to see the bison, 24, n. 10, 50 ; sent 
to the Bermudas, went to the fish- 
ing-banks for food, 42 ; to Mt. 
Desert for plunder, 47 ; bad record 
and government, 50 ; robbed Com- 
pany and colonists, 50, 52 ; fitted 
out a ship for piracy, 51 ; charter 
procured for a new plantation to 
protect, 51, 63, n. 13 ; escaped in 
nick of time, 52. 

Argonauts of the New World set sail, 

25-. 

Arianism, divergencies in direction 
of, in Massaciiusetts, 267. 

Ark, The, and The Dove, efforts to 
prevent departure of, 241 ; no Prot- 
estant minister or worship on board, 
242. 

Armada, the Spanish, patriotism 
aroused by the danger from, 121. 

Armenian silk-raisers brought to Vir- 
ginia, 78. 

Arminian Nunnery, 93, m. 

Arminianism spreads among the High- 
Church clergy, 133, 192. 

Arminians and Calvinists, Laud at- 
tempts to suppress debate between, 
194. 

Arminians excluded from toleration 
in the Netherlands, 298, 312, n. iS. 

Arnold's History of Rhode Island, 
311, n. 17. 

Articles of Union, the, provided for 
freedom of private belief, 312, n. 18. 

Arundel, Lord, a friend of Sir George 
Calvert, 226 ; territory assigned to, 
259, n. 5. 

Asher's History of West India Com- 
pany, 177, m. 

Asia, efforts to reach, 3. 



Aspinwall Papers, 56, m. ; 70, n. 15 ; 

264, n. 20. 

Aubrey's Survey of Wiltshire, 136, n. 5. 

Augustine on the Sunday-Sabbath, 
137, n. 8 ; 140, n. 13. 

Austerfeld, a cradle of the Pilgrims, 
149; the stolid rustics of, 150; the 
font at which Bradford was bap- 
tized, 151 ; inhabitants at Brad- 
ford's birth a most ignorant people, 
152. 

Austerity in morals a Puritan charac- 
teristic, 119. 

Auxiliary societies formed, 53. 

Avalon, Calvert's province in New- 
foundland called, 224, 258, n. 3 ; 
charter of, 225, 234 ; primary de- 
sign of the colony, 225 ; 259, n. 5 ; 
troubles of Baltimores and Puritans 
in. 22S ; abandoned by Calvert, 230 ; 
Catholic emigrants to, 239. 

Bacon, Lord, objects to heretics set- 
tling a colony, 171. 

Bacon's Lord, An Advertisement 
touching Controversies, 117, m. ; 
Advice to Villiers, 171, m. ; Certain 
Considerations, 162, m. ; Essay on 
Plantations, 27, m. ; Observation on 
a Libel, 163, m. ; Speech in reply 
to the Speaker, 25, m. 

Bacon's Laws of Maryland, 264, n. 19 ; 

265, n. 22. 

Bacon, Nathaniel, 60, n. i. 

Bacon, Roger, on the Sunday ques- 
tion, 138, n. 8. 

Baillie, Robert, on John Robinson, 
156. 

Baltimore, first Baron. See Calvert, 
George. 

Baltimore, Letters to Wentworth, 
241, m. 

Baltimore, second Baron. See Cal- 
vert, Cecilius. 

Bancroft, Richard, Bishop of London, 
theatrical adulation of King James, 
161 ; as primate persecutes the 
Puritans, 162 ; stops emigration to 
Virginia, 16S, 183, n. 2. 

Baptist Church, the General, on 
earthly and spiritual authority, 312, 
n. 19. 

Baptists, Williams and his followers 
become, 303. 

Barclay's Inner Life, 146, m. ; 186, n. 
6; 312, n. 19: 314, n. 24. 



hidcx. 



353 



Barlow's Svmme and Svbslance, 143, 
m. ; 160, m. ; 162, m. ; 1S2, n. i. 

Barrow hanged at Tyburn, 148. 

Barrowism a mean between Presby- 
terianisra and Brownism, 148 ; the 
model for the church at Scrooby, 

154- 
Bawtry, the station near Scrooby, 149, 

150, 151- 

Baylie, Robert, condemns the tolera- 
tion of the Dutch, 164, 311, n. 18. 

Baylie's Errours and Induration, 164, 
m. ; 311, n. 18. 

Bell, ringing of only one, to call peo- 
ple to church, 129 ; of more than 
one a sin, 130. 

Bentley's Description of Salem, 200, 
m. ; Historical Account of Salem, 
311, n. 17. 

Berkeley, Sir William, persecution of 
Puritans in Virginia by, 252, 

Bermudas, Gates and Somers ship- 
wrecked on the, 40 ; birds and wild 
hogs at the, 41, 65, n. 6 ; marvelous 
escape from the, 41, 65, n. 6. 

Beste, George, 2, m. ; 4 ; on the New 
World, 21, n. 2. 

Biard on Dale's severity to French 
prisoners, 66, n. 9. 

Bible, reading the, as part of the serv- 
ice, reprehended by the extremists, 
117. 

Birch's Court of James I, 68, n. 10 ; 
69, n. 14; 72, n. 19 ; 258, n. i. 

Bishoprics filled by Elizabeth, 143. 

Bishops, effect of the hostility of the, 
to the Puritans. 112 ; attacked by 
the Mar-Prelate tracts, 115 ; reac- 
tion in favor of, 121 ; had become 
Protestant to most people, 123. 

Bison found near the Potomac, 50. 

Blackstone, William, first settler at 
Boston, igo. 

Blake's Annals of Dorchester, 219, 
n. 9. 

Boston chosen as fittest place for pub- 
lic meetings, 319 ; secured Cotton 
to balance Newton's Hooker, 319. 

Boston church, Roger Williams re- 
fused to become a minister of, 270. 

Boston Town Records, 329, m. 

Boulton, a Separatist, recanted and 
hung himself, 157, n. 2. 

Bowling in the streeits the daily work 
at Jamestown, 44. 

Bowls, Calvin playing at, on Sunday, 

24 



124 ; Mar-Prelate berates the Bishop 
of London for playing, 128. 

Bownd's, Dr., Sabbath of the Old and 
the New Testament, 124, 128 ; 
views rapidly accepted, 129 ; ultra- 
propositions exceeded, 130 ; capti- 
vated the religious public, 130 ; op- 
position to, 131 ; new edition pub- 
lished, 132, 139, n. 10. 

Bozman, 265, n. 22. 

Bradford, William, a silk-weaver in 
Leyden, 169 ; chosen governor at 
Plymouth, 179 ; abolishes commu- 
nism, 180 ; of high aspiration re- 
strained by practical wisdom, 306. 

Bradford's Dialogue of 1593, 146, m. ; 
Plimoth Plantation, 145, m. ; 153, 
m. ; 154, m. ; 155, m. ; 158, n. 3 ; 165, 
m. ; 166, m. ; 175, m. ; 1S4, n. 4 ; 186, 
n 9 ; 274, m. 

Brewster, William, at court, 152 ; 
master of the post at Scrooby, 153 ; 
secured ministers for neighboring 
parishes who were silenced, 153 ; 
the host and ruling elder of the 
Scrooby church, 154 ; useful career 
of, 155 ; project of forming a new 
state, 167 ; books owned by, 168. 

Briefe Declaration, MS., 27, m. ; 40, 
m. ; 43, m.; 44, m. ; 45, m. ; 46, m. ; 
47, m. ; 66, n. 9. 

Brieff Discourse of the Troubles be- 
gun at Frankfort, 135, n. 3. 

Briggs, Henry, on the nearness of the 
Pacific, 10, 22, n. 6. 

Bristol colony in Newfoundland, 258, 
n. 3. 

British Museum, MS., 42, m. ; 44. m. 

Broughton wrote a tractate on the 
Jewish ephod, 108. 

Brown, Richard, submitted to remon- 
strance, 2go. 

Browne, John and Samuel, sent back 
to England by Endecott, 200. 

Browne, Robert, leader of the Sepa- 
ratists, 145 ; despised for recanting, 
died in prison, 146 ; career lasted 
only four or five years, 147 ; John 
Roisinson's justification of, 157, n. i ; 
authorities on, 157, n. i ; 158, n. 2. 

Brownists. See Separatists. 

Brown's Genesis of the United States, 

94, n. I ; 1S3, n. 3. 

Bruce's Economic Plistory of Virginia, 

95. n- 3- 

Buckingham dominant at court, 193 ; 



354 



The Beginners of a Nation. 



consents to sale of Calvert's secre- 
taryship, 227. 
Bull and bear baiting on Sunday, icg. 
Buliein's Dialogue against the Fever 

Pestilence, 23, n. 8 ; 126. 
Burgesses, House of, in Virginia, 55. 
Burk's History of Virginia, 6q, n. 13. 
Burleigh, Lord Treasurer, treatise on 

Execution of Justice in England 

published by, 238. 
Burns's Prel. Diss, to Woodrow, 159, 

m. ; 160, m. 
Busher, Leonard, petitioned James I 

for liberty of conscience, 312, n. 19. 

Cabins at Jamestown, 29. 

Cabot, John, discovers America, 3 ; 
his ships retarded by codfish, i3 ; 
Deane's voyages of, 21, n. i ; Har- 
risse on, 21, n. i. 

Cabot, Sebastian, not a discoverer, 21, 
n. I ; a doubtful authority, 24, n. 9. 

Calendar of Colonial Documents, 70, 
n. 15 ; 96, n. 5 ; 259, n. 5. 

Calendar of Domestic Papers, 259, 
n. 6. 

Calendar of Domestic State Papers 
James I, 77, m. 

Calendar of State Papers America, 
224, m. 

Caliban suggested by popular interest 
in savages, 17. 

Calvert, Cecilius, second Lord Balti- 
more, son of George Calvert, 234 ; 
expected large Catholic migration, 
240 ; religious aim of, 240 ; part- 
ners in financial risks, 240, 263, n. 
13 ; policy of toleration, 242 ; or- 
ders the Catholic service to be con- 
ducted privately on shipboard, 242 ; 
a conservative opportunist, 243 ; 
supported at court by Strafford, 249 ; 
schemes against Virginia, 249, 264, 
n. 21 ; seeks to be governor, 250 ; 
offer to New England people, 252 ; 
had Maryland oath of fidelity modi- 
fied for Puritans, 253 ; yielded office 
of governor to Protestant, 254 ; 
again master of Maryland, 257. 

Calvert, George, character of, 221 ; 
his rise in power, 223 ; denied be- 
ing bribed by Spain, 223, 258, n. i ; 
member of Virginia Company, 1609, 
224, 229 ; councilor for New Eng- 
land, 224 ; establishes colony in 
Newfoundland, 224, 239 ; his con- 



version to Catholicism, 226; intract- 
able, 225 ; resigned secretaryship 
and made Baron Baltimore, 228, 
259, n. 6 ; in Newfoundland, 228, 
229 ; sails to Virginia, 229 ; not re- 
ceived hospitably, 230 ; refuses to 
take oath of supremacy, and leaves 
Virginia, 232; religious enthusiasm, 
233, 258, n. 3 ; passion for planting 
colonies, 233 ; death of, 233. 

Calvert Papers, 250, m. ; 264, n. 17. 

Calvin, John, the dominant influence 
at Geneva, 104 ; on the Sabbath, 
124 ; Cotton a follower of, 329. 

Calvinism, materials for subjective 
joys provided by, 327. 

Calvinistic churches, efforts to as- 
similate the Church of England to 
the, 112 ; controversy adds another 
issue, 133 ; doctrines popular, 328, 
329, 347, n. 4. 

Calvinists and Arminians, Laud's at- 
tempt to suppress debates between, 
194. 

Cambridge settled under the name of 
Newtown, 317. 

Cambridge pledge, the, of V.'inthrop 
and others, 209. 

Camden's Elements of New England, 
177, m. 

Canada, Brownists ask leave to settle 
in, 167. 

Cannibalism at Jamestown, 39 ; de- 
nied by Gates, 65, n. 5. 

Cape Anne, failure of Dorchester 
Company's colony on, i8g, igg. 

Cape Cod shoals turn back the May- 
flower, 177, 186, n. 7. 

Carlisle's treatise, 75, m. 

Cartwright, leader of the Presbyte- 
rians, 112, 136, n. 6. 

Cartwright's Admonition to Parlia- 
ment, 129, m. 

Carver, John, chosen governor, 173, 
184, n. 4. 

Castle Island, platform constructed 
on, 284. 

Catholic conscience, oath made of- 
fensive to the, 237. 

Catholic migration, the, 220 ; revival 
in England, 226 ; settlers in New- 
foundland, 22S, 239 ; Baltimore 
family openly, 22S, 235 ; migration 
to Maryland small, 240 ; pilgrims 
very religious, 243, 244, 245 ; tax 
on Catholic servants in Maryland, 



Index. 



355 



24S ; colony in Maryland until after 
1640, 247 ; at peace with Puritans in 
Maryland, 254 ; element protected 
in Maryland, 257 ; party in minor- 
ity in Maryland, 266. 

Catholicism condoned, to conciliate 
Spain, 238 ; tide toward, in Eng- 
land, 240. 

Catholics, Irish, not allowed to settle 
in Virginia, 231; Baltimore's party 
of, repelled from Virginia, 231 ; 
harsh laws in England against, 236, 
237, 238 ; enforcement of penal stat- 
utes against, 239 ; co-religionists of 
queen, 239 ; toleration and protec- 
tion to English Catholics in Mary- 
land, 242 ; no perfect security for, 
in Maryland, 248 ; rich and influ- 
ential families of, in Maryland, 264, 
n. 18 ; conciliation to Protestants 
at expense of fairness toward, 251 ; 
papist religion forbidden, 257 ; ex- 
cluded from toleration in the Neth- 
erlands, 2g8, 312, n. 18. 

Catlet, Colonel, reaches the Allcgha- 
nies, II. 

Cattle, scarce in Massachusetts col- 
ony, 320 ; perished in Connecticut, 
324. 

Cavalier emigration to Virginia, 345. 

Cedar timber exported, 45. 

Ceremonies, observance of pompous, 
loi ; bitter debates about, io3 ; 
ceased to be abhorrent, 123. 

Certayne Qvestions concerning the 
high priest's ephod, 108, m. 

Chapman, Jonson and Marston's East- 
ward, Ho ! 23, n. 8. 

Charles I, coronation robe of silk 
for, from Virginia, 78 ; obliterated 
by Puritanism, 133. 

Charles II wore silk raised in Vir- 
ginia, 78. 

Charter, the Great, granted by the 
Virginia Company, 55, 173, 206 ; 
only information concerning, 70, n. 
15- 

Charter for a private plantation ob- 
tained by Warwick, 51, 68, n. 13. 

Charter of New England, 1620, 173 ; 
of the Massachusetts Company, 210, 
218, n. 7; of Avalon, April 7, 1623, 
225 ; for precinct in Virginia grant- 
ed to Leyden pilgrims, 229 ; for 
new palatinate on north side of the 
Potomac granted to Baltimore, 233 ; 



of Maryland passed, 234 ; terms of 
the, 234, 235, 236; compared with 
those of Avalon, 234 ; ambiguous, 
251. 

Charter-House School founded by 
legacy as Sutton's Hospital, 268 ; 
attended by Roger Williams, 268. 

Chesapeake Bay mapped by Captain 
John Smith, 36. 

Chesapeake region securely English, 
345- 

Chimes not in accord with a severe 
Sabbath, 129. 

Church, a " particular," Puritans de- 
sire to found, 197 ; the unit of New 
England migration, 325. 

Church at Jamestown enlarged, 42, 
65, n. 7. 

Church economy, each system of, 
claimed divine authority, 113. 

Church, English, Laud sought to 
make Catholic, 193. 

Church government, three periods of, 
112, 136, n. 6 ; questions of, fell 
into abeyance, 137, n. 6 ; Barrow- 
ism, the form of, brought to New 
England, 148 ; Puritans desire to 
make real their ideal of, ig8 ; Puri- 
tan passion for, 212. 

Church of England repudiated as anti- 
christian, 147 ; divergencies in di- 
rection of, in Massachusetts, 267. 

Church of the exiles at Frankfort, 
the factions in developed into two 
great parties, 105. 

Church quarrels at Strasburg and 
Frankfort, 105 ; reform, no hope of 
securing, 196, 197. 

Churches of Massachusetts formed on 
model of Robinson's Independency, 
213 ; lack of-uniformity in the ear- 
ly, 215 ; borrowed discipline and 
form of government from Plymouth, 

215- , 
Churchill's Voyages, 265, n. 23. 
Churchmen, High, aggressive, 113. 
Cities of refuge on the Continent, 104 ; 

English churches organized in, 104. 
Civet cat, Hariot thought, would prove 

profitable, 19. 
Claiborne, claim of, to Kent Island, 

253- 

Clap's, Roger, Memoirs, 213, m. 

Clarendon Papers, 67, n. 9. 

Clarke's Gladstone and Mar)'land Tol- 
eration, 245, m. 



356 



TJie Beginners of a Nation. 



Clergymen most active writers in 
favor of colonization, 91 ; some 
preach sermons but stay away from 
public prayer, 143 ; supported by 
magistrates in Massachusetts if 
church order was disturbed, 266 ; 
men of unusual prudence in ranks 
of, 266. 

Climate of Great Britain not favorable 
to raising products of the jMediter- 
ranean, 75. 

Coddington's Letter, 30S, n. g. 

Code of Lawes, Divine, Morall, and 
Martiall, by Sir Thomas Smyth, 70, 
n. 16 ; 132. 

Codfish, multitude of, on coast of 
Newfoundland, 18. 

Coxe, Sir Edward, defended legacy 
which founded Charter- House 
School, 268 ; appointed Roger Wil- 
liams to a scholarship, 26S ; schism 
detested by, 270. 

College proposed and endowed, gi. 

Collier's Ecclesiastical History of 
Great Britain, 263, n. 12. 

Colonial Constitution of Virginia 
modified for the worse, 24g. 

Colonial Papers, 63, n. 11 ; 71, n. iS ; 
262, n. II ; 264, n. 21 ; 265, n. 25 ; 
346, n. I. 

Colonial proprietors, 70, n. 15. 

Colonial Records of Virginia, 70, n. 

15- . 

Colonies, secondary, 220. 

Colonists, efforts of friends to succor, 
thwarted, 47 ; loss of life among, in 
Virginia, 58. 

Colonization, English, the fate of, set- 
tled by the experiments on the 
James River, 58 ; promoted, to get 
rid of excess of population, 136, n. 
5 ; unwise management ruined 
many projects for, 178. 

Colony, English, rise of the first, i ; 
motives for founding, 73. 

Colony government, primary and sec- 
ondary forms of, 218, n. 7. 

Colony of St. Maries, 245. 

Colony-planters drawn from the ranks 
of the uneasy, 171, 220. 

Colony-planting, Hakluyt's tireless 
advocacy of, 5 ; John Smith on, 37 ; 
spurred by three motives, 74 ; kept 
alive by delusions, 74 ; first princi- 
ples of, not understood, 76 ; an eco- 
nomic problem, 84 ; the religious 



motive most successful in, iSg, 220 ; 
centrifugal forces in, 220, 266. 

Commandment, the fourth, held to be 
partly moral, partly ceremonial, 138, 
n. 8 ; 140, n. 13 ; Shepard holds it 
to be wholly moral, 140, n. 13. 

Commerce with the Orient, the hope 
of, retarded settlement, 4. 

Commissions, forged, to "press" 
maidens, 72, n. ig. 

Commodities, sixteen staple, exhibited 
from Virginia, 4g ; production of, 
the main hope of wealth for Vir- 
ginia, 75, g7, n. g. 

Commons inclosed, iii, 135, n. 5. 

Commons Journal, 71, n. 18. 

Communion, withdrawal of, a funda- 
mental principle of Separatism, 271. 

Communism at Jamestown, 26, 42 ; 
abolished, 56 ; attempted at Plym- 
outh, i6g, 185, n. 4; abolished by 
Bradford, 180 ; evils of, 186, n. g. 

Compact, the, of the Pilgrims, 173, 
183, n. 4 ; iSs.n. 5. 

Company's Chief Root of Differences, 
the, 52, m. ; authors of, 6g, n. 13. 

Congregationalism, rise of, in New 
England, 214. 

Connecticut, a secondaiy colony, 220 ; 
the migration to, has an epic inter- 
est, 316 ; independent constitution 
adopted by, 325 ; accounts adverse 
to, circulated in England, 326. 

Connecticut Historical Society Col- 
lections, 326, m ; 347, n. 2. 

Connecticut River, stories of the fer- 
tility of the intervale land on the, 

322 ; dangerous Pequots on the, 

323 ; soil did not need to be 
" fished," 324. 

Consciences, oppressed, places of ref- 
uge for, in the Low Countries, 163. 

Conservative and radical, difference 
between constitutional, log; church- 
man limited his Protestantism, 
log. 

Constitutional government, starting 
point of, in the New World, 55. 

Continent, an arctic and antarctic, 2 ; 
crossed by Ingram in a year, 14. 

Controversie concerning Liberty of 
Conscience, 300, m. 

Conversion of the Indians, desired 
for the sake of trade, 16, go, 216, 
n. 4 ; orders for the, 42 ; interest 
in, becomes secondary, 204, 209 ; 



Index. 



357 



authorities on the, 216, n. 4 ; by 
the Catholics, 247. 

Convicts asked for by Dale, 47. 

Cook's Historical View of Christianity, 
138, n. 8. 

Cooper, Dr., Bishop of Winchester, an- 
swered first Mar-Prelate tract, 116. 

Copley, business administrator of 
Jesuits, 251, 264, n. 17. 

Corn not planted at proper season, 
44, 60, n. 2 ; ground for, cleared, 
48 ; more raised by private than by 
public labor, 49. 

Cotton, John, apparent sanction of 
Antinomianism by, 267 ; one of the 
greatest luminaries of the Puritans 
and one of the lights of New Eng- 
land, 269 ; apostle of theocracy, 
shaped ecclesiastical affairs in New 
England, 279, 308, n. 8 ; his rivals 
left Massachusetts, 280 ; virtually 
attained a bishop's authority, 280 ; 
on Williams's book, 282 ; complete 
system of church state organization, 
287 ; verbal legerdemain on Wil- 
liams's banishment, 297 ; casuistry 
of, 299, 313, n. 20 ; 321 ; attitude 
toward Williams's banishment, 299, 
300, 313, n. 21 ; source of his in- 
tolerance, 300 ; belongs am.ong the 
diplomatic builders of churches, 
306 ; uncandid and halting ac- 
counts of Williams's trial, 309, 310, 
n. 12 ; 311, n. 17 ; curious sinuosity 
of conscience, 313, n. 21 ; secured 
by Boston to balance Newtown's 
Hooker, 319 ; rivalry with Hooker, 
320 ; Puritanism of, grew in a gar- 
den of spices, 321 : of a sanguine 
temperament, 328 ; his advent fol- 
lowed by widespread religious ex- 
citement, 329 ; theological differ- 
ences between his teachings and 
those of Hooker, 346, n. i ; Model 
of Moses his Judicials, 326 ; opin- 
ions recanted and modified by, 336 ; 
defends Mrs. Hutchinson, 337 ; 
persuades her to recant, 339 ; dis- 
franchises her sons, 339 ; belated 
zeal of, against the sectaries, 341 ; 
wallows in superstition, 341. 

Cotton planted, 2g. 

Cotton's Answer to Williams's Ex- 
amination, 308, n. 10, II ; 310, n. 
16 ; 313, n. 20, 21 ; Fountain of 
Life, 328, m. ; Sermon on the 



Church's Resurrection, 331, m. ; 
334, m ; Way of Congregational 
Churches, 157, n. 2 ; 219, n. 10 ; 
330, m ; 336, m. 

Council for New England grants a 
patent to the Massachusetts pro- 
jectors, 199, 207. 

Councilors of estate in Virginia, 55. 

Counter-Blaste to Tobacco, 84, m. 

Country, a barren, a great whet to 
industry, 177. 

Courtier, the honor of a, possessed by 
Calvert, 223 ; the happiest has least 
to do at court, 258, n. i. 

Courts of High Commission, penalties 
of, 270. 

Covenant of grace vs. covenant of 
works, 331, 334, 335. 

Cox, Richard, followers of, dispute 
with those of John Knox, 105. 

Cox's Literature of the Sabbath Ques- 
tion, 127, m. ; 138, n. 8 ; 139, n. 10. 

Cradock, Mathew, Governor of the 
Massachusetts Company, proposes 
transfer of the government, 206, 
208, 209 ; resigned his governor- 
.ship, 210; denounced by Laud, 
211 ; letter to Endecott, 216, n. 4. 

Credulity about America, 2, 20 ; abyss 
of seventeenth century, 341. 

Customs, low, advocated by Captain 
John Smith, 37. 

Cyuile and Vncyuile Life, 134, n. i. 

Dainties, preachers who spread a 
table of, complained of, 328, 348, 
n. 5- 

Dainty, Argall's voyage in the, 50. 

Dale, Sir Thomas, sent to Virginia, 
43 ; tyranny of, 45-47 ; horrible 
cruelties of, 46 ; services, 47 ; theat- 
rical return, 48, 68, n. 10 ; glowing 
reports of the country, 49, 168 ; 
cruelties of, proved, 66, n. 9 ; his 
severity, 67, n. g ; various authori- 
ties on, 67, n. g. 

Danvers, Sir John, interested in the 
Virginia Company, 54 ; in power, 
71, n. 17 ; one of the fathers of rep- 
resentative government in America, 

173- 
Darien, Isthmus of, 6. 
Davenport, John, took part in the 

synod, 343 ; with his followers 

planted the New Haven colony, 

343- 



358 



TJie Beginners of a Nation. 



Days of the week, scruples about the 
heathen names of the, 302, 31.1., 
n. 23. 

Days of fasting and prayer appointed, 

324- 

De Costa, in Mag. of Amer. Hist., 
23, n. 8. 

De la Warr, Lady, plundered l^y Ar- 
gall, 50. 

De la Warr, Lord, sends expedition 
for gold, 13 ; arrival of, regretted 
by the old settlers, 41 ; governor at 
Jamestown, 41 ; resides at the falls 
of the James, 43 : flight of, from the 
colony, 43 ; nominally governor, 
44 ; ceremonious landing at James- 
town, loi ; escorted to church by 
gentlemen and guards, 102. 

Deane, Charles, Voyages of Cabot, 21, 
n. I ; misunderstood a statement 
by Bradford, 184, n. 4. 

Debate, the Puritan, loS ; bitterness 
of the, 114; new issues, 123 ; ad- 
vantage of new ground of, to the 
Puritan, 131. 

Debates, theological, concerned with 
speculative dogmas, io3. 

Declaration of Virginia, 95, n. 3. 

Delft Haven, the parting at, 175. 

Delusions in colony-planting, 74. 

Deptford, gold-refining works at, 13. 

De Rasieres's letter, 103, m. 

Dermer, seeking the Pacific, is driven 
into Long Island Sound, 9. 

Description of the Now-discovered 
river and Country of Virginia, 96, 
n. 7. 

Desertion, Dale's punishment for, 

Devil worship, Indian, belief in, 16. 

De Vries's Voyages, m., 231. 

Dexter, F. B., in Winsor's Narrative 
and Critical History, 155, m. 

Dexter's H. M., Congregationalism, 
147, m. ; 157, n. i ; 185, n. 6 ; " As 
to Roger Williams," as erudite as 
it is one-sided, 311, n. 17. 

Discontent, numerous causes for, in, 
.135. n. 5- 

Discourse of the Old Virginia Com- 
pany, 54, m. ; 66, n. 9 ; 68, n. 11 ; 
70, n. 16. 

Discovery, the pinnace, 25. 

Dispersions from the mother colony, 

315- 
Display, love of, in Elizabeth's time. 



98 ; greatness declared itself by, 
100, 134, n. 2. 

Dissension, outbreak of, among the 
English Protestant exiles, 104. 

Dividends, Dale's aim to make the 
colony pay, 45. 

D'Ogeron supplied buccaneers with 
wives, 71, n. 18. 

Dogs as food, 8. 

Domestic Correspondence, James I, 
134, n. r. 

Dorchester Company, failure of colo- 
ny of, on Cape Ann, 189, 199. 

Dorchester, Mass., church covenant, 
219, n. 9 ; ready to follow the lead 
of Hooker, 323 ; settlers remove 
from to Connecticut, 324 ; church 
emigrated bodily, 325. 

Drama, the age of the, 99. 

Dress, inordinate display in, 134, n. 2 ; 
laws to repress, 100 ; excesses in, de- 
nounced, 120 ; regulations agamst, 
in Massachusetts, 2S5. 

Drunkenness, punishment for, 342. 

Dudley, a zealous advocate of reli- 
gious intolerance, 287 ; impatient to 
snuff out Williams, 2S8 ; verse by, 
2S8 ; rude and overbearing, 338. 

Dudley to the Countess of Lincoln, 
174, 317, m. 

Durham, legal power of Bishops of, 
given to proprietor of Maryland, 
236, 263, n. 12. 

Dutch Government declined to assure 
the Pilgrims of protection against 
England, 173 ; made tempting of- 
fers to the Independents, 176 ; de- 
spised for showing toleration, 298, 
311, n. 18 ; laid claim to the Con- 
necticut, 323 ; occupation giving 
way, 346. 

Duties, heavy, on tobacco, 85, 96, 
n. 8. 

Dyer, Maiy, misfortune of, 340. 

East India Company's agents, cruelty 
of, 67, n. 9. 

East Indies, desire for a short passage 
to the, 3, 4, 5, 12, 22, n. 5. 

Eastward, Ho ! the play of, 23. 

Ecclesiastical Commission, the in- 
quisitorial, 114. 

Ecclesiastical extension desired by the 
English Church, 90 ; organization 
of the Brownists dominant, 141 ; 
politics explosive in Massachusetts, 



Index. 



359 



326 ; system of government, petty 
tyranny that inheres in, 342. 

Economic success of the Virginia col- 
ony assured, 49 ; adverse conditions 
more deadly than an ungenial cli- 
mate, 78 ; problems solved by home- 
ly means, 84. 

Edwards, T., Antapologia, 217, n. 4. 

Eliot, Sir John, confined in the Tower, 
203. 

Eliot, John, convinced of error, 2go, 
291 ; usher and disciple of Hooker, 

317- 

Eliot's Biography, 201, m. ; 2S8, m. 

Elizabeth, Queen, jeweled dresses of, 
98 ; gorgeous progresses of, gg ; 
could not compel uniformity, 109 ; 
threatens to unfrock a bishop, 1 10 ; 
molded the church to her will, 112 ; 
her policy of repression resulted in 
the civil war, 114 ; greatest popu- 
larity in last years of her reign, 
121. 

Elizabethan age, the, i ; prodigal of 
daring adventure, 20. 

Ellis Letters, The, 182, n. i. 

Ellis collection, first series, 238, m. 

Elton's brief biography of Roger Wil- 
liams, 311, n. 17. 

Emigrants sail for Virginia, 25 ; bad 
character of the, 27, 59. 

Emigration to New England quick- 
ened by troubles that preceded the 
civil war, 344 ; reached greatest 
height in 1638, 344 ; ceased entire- 
ly in 1640, 344 ; to Virginia and 
Mainland, received impetus from 
check of Puritan exodus, 344, 345. 

Emmanuel College, Cambridge, the 
cradle of Puritan divines, 316. 

Endecott, John, leadership and char- 
acter of, 200 ; cut arm of cross 
from English colors, 201 ; put Quak- 
ers to death, 202 ; impetuous radi- 
calism of, 271 ; protested against 
the double injustice to Salem, 291 ; 
arrested, apologized, and submitted, 
291 ; witnesses for Mrs. Hutchin- 
son browbeaten by, 338. 

England, danger from, feared in 
Massachusetts, 2S4, 285. 

English, character of the, at the period 
of Elizabeth and James, 20; sober 
living of, 342 ; superior aptitude of, 
for planting agricultural communi- 
ties, 346 ; coinpactness of settle- 



ment and increase of, decided the 
fate of North America, 346. 

English knowledge and notions of 
America, i ; first protest against 
oppression, 56 ; jealousy of Spain, 
74, 94, n. I ; ecclesiastics reproached 
by Roman Catholics, go, g7, n. 11 ; 
Church leaders not content while 
Spanish priests converted infidels, 
go ; eminent clergy among the ex- 
iled, 104 ; churches organized in 
cities of refuge, 104 ; beginning of 
two parties in the Church, 107 ; 
heads of the Church attacked by 
War-Prelate, 115 ; laws against 
Catholics embarrass the foreign 
policy, 238 ; rise of the first of the 
colonies, i ; prospective ascendency 
of the colonies, 345. 

English Protestantism. See Protes- 
tantism, English. 

Ephod of Jewish high priest, discus- 
sion of material of, 108. 

Epworth, the nest of Methodism, 150. 

Esquimaux kidnaped by Frobisher, 17. 

Eustachius and his document dropped 
from heaven, 138, n. 8. 

Evans, Owen, accused of "pressing" 
maidens, 72, n. ig. 

Evelyn's Diary, 18, m. ; 134, n. i. 

Excerpta de Diversis Literis, 246, m. 

Excommunication dreaded by the Pu- 
ritans, 33g. 

Exiles, the English, 104 ; return of, 
107 ; results of their squabbles, 107. 

Exploration, American, the history of, 
a story of delusion and mistake, 3 ; 
retarded settlement, 4. 

Extravagance of Indian tales, 8. 

Factions at Jamestown, 36, 64, n. 4. 

Fairs and markets on Sundays, 138, 
n. 8. 

Faith, devotion to, 245. 

Families, the colony a camp of men 
without, 42 ; a plantation can never 
flourish without, 57 ; some, sent to 
Virginia with De la VVarr, 65, n. 8. 

Family of Love, Anne Hutchinson 
accused of accepting the doctrines 
of the, 335. 

Famine at Jamestown, 38, 65, n. 5. 

Fast day, a, appointed in Massachu- 
setts, 286. 

Ferrar, John, election of, 71, n. 17 ; 
deputy governor, gi. 



360 



TJie Beginners of a Nation. 



Ferrar, Nicholas, Jr., deputy governor 
of Virginia Company, 91; estab- 
lished a religious community at Lit- 
tle Gidding, 92 ; austere discipline 
of, 93 ; medicvval enthusiasm of, 
194. 

Ferrar, Nicholas, Sr., courts of Vir- 
ginia Company held at house of, 
91 ; gave money for educating in- 
fidels in Virginia, 91. 

Ferrars, the, among the founders of 
liberal institutions in America, 173. 

Firearms, sale of, to the savages, 191, 
216, n. I. 

Firmin's, Giles, Review of Davis's 
Vindication, 34S, n. 5. 

Fisheries, American, importance of, 
foreseen, by Capt. John Smith, 37 ; 
of Newfoundland, 261, n. 7. 

Fishing on Sunday, ordinances against, 
127. 

Fishing seasons in the James River 
learned, 49. 

Fleet, Henry, only survivor of Spel- 
man's party, 22, n. 7. 

Fleet's Journal, 23, n. 7. 

Flemish Protestants favored inde- 
pendency, 15S, n. 2. 

Font, the stone, at which Bradford 
was baptized, 151. 

Food, bad and insufficient, 45. 46. 

Force, men not to be converted by, 
312, n. 19. 

Formalities, proper, never omitted, 
41, loi ; at Plymouth, 102. 

Founding of a state a secondary end, 

73- 

Fox, Luke, sails to the northwest, 10. 

Franck's, Sebastian, Chronica, 314, 
n. 24. 

Frankfort, disputes in the chuixh at, 
produced great results, 105 ; char- 
acter of debates at, 105 ; rapid 
changes produced by the, 106, 135, 
n. 3- 

Freemen's oath extended to residents, 
289, 308, n. II ; opposed by Wil- 
liams, 289, 309, n. 12. 

Fresh River of the Dutch, the Con- 
necticut, 324. 

Frobisher's, Sir Martin, voyages, 2, 4, 
n. I ; brilliant failure, 5 ; attempt 
to plant a colony, 7 ; finds "gold 
cure," 13 ; Voyages, 21, n. i. 

Fuller, Thomas, judgment of Captain 
John Smith, 63, n. 3. 



Fuller's Church History, 103, m. ; 
131, m. ; 157, n. i : 160, m. ; 
Worthies, 259, n. 6. 

Gainsborough, the hamlet of, 150. 

Gammell's Life of Roger Vv'illiams, 
311, n. 17. 

Gardens, private, apportioned in Vir- 
ginia, 48, 49, 68, n. 12. 

Gates, Sir Thomas, wrecked on the 
Bermudas, 40 ; abandoned the 
wreck of Jamestown, 41, loi ; sent 
to England for cattle, 41 ; denied 
that human flesh was eaten, 65, n. 
5 ; installed governor in proper 
form, loi. 

General Court of Massachusetts pro- 
tested against selection of Williams 
as a minister of the Salem church, 
271 ; prevented his ordination, 272, 
307, n. 5 ; makes regulations for 
dress, 285 ; appointed a fast day, 
286 ; promulgated a new resident's 
oath, 289 ; " convented " Williams 
several times, 289 ; forced Salem 
into submission, 291, 293 ; tried 
and banished Williams, 292 ; fear- 
ing his settlement at Narragansett 
Bay, agreed to send him to Eng- 
land, 294 ; banished scores for their 
opinions, 297 ; the real extenuation 
for the conduct of the, 297 ; charac- 
ter of the age forbids condemnation 
of, 300. 

Geneva, the city of refuge for the 
Puritans, 104 ; differences between 
exiles at, and those at Zurich, 107. 

Gibbons, Captain, of Boston, commis- 
sion sent to, 252. 

Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, on a north- 
west passage, 5 ; attempt to plant a 
colony, 7. 

Glass-blowers ran away to the In- 
dians, 83. 

Glass, window, not used in the col- 
ony, 65, n. 7. 

Glass-works established near James- 
town, 83, 95, n. 5. 

Glastonbury, also called Avalon, 258, 
n. 3- 

Glover in Phil. Trans., 11, m. 

Godspeed, The, 25. 

Gold and silver, exportation of, re- 
strained by law, 75. 

Gold, belief in finding, in North 
America, 12, 14, 22, n. 7 ; 75. 



Index. 



361 



Gold-hunting, 7, 12 ; in Virginia, 13, 

23. 42. 

Gold mines of the Hudson River, 23. 

Gondomar's spies in the Virginia 
Company, 87 ; influence over Cal- 
vert, 226, 258, n. 2. 

Goodman's Court of King James, 
25S, n. 2. 

Goodwin, Thomas, and others, Apolo- 
getical Narrative, 1S5, n. 6. 

Gorges's Briefe Narration, 196, m. 

Gowns and litanies, squabbles about, 
107. 

Gosnold, agitating for a new colony, 
33 ; failure of colony in Buzzard's 
Bay established by, 178. 

Government, democratic, established 
by the Pilgrims before sailing, 185, 
n. 5 ; three primary steps for, in 
America, due to Englishmen who 
did not cross the sea, 205. 

Government, representative form of, 
established, 55, 8g ; faint promise 
of, in Maryland charter, 234. 

Governmental functions exercised by 
commercial corporations, 2i8, n. 8. 

Grace after meat opposed by Wil- 
liams, 289, 290, 292, 309, n. 12. 

Greenham's, Richard, ]\1S. on the 
Sabbath, 128. 

Greenwood, leader of the Separatists, 
hanged at Tyburn, 148. 

Grenville, Sir Richard, sent to Vir- 
ginia by Ralegh, 21, n. 3. 

Guiana or North America, Pilgrims 
choose between, 169. 

Guicciardini on use of spices, 22, n 5. 

Guilds, dissolution of the, iii. 

Haies in Hakluyt's Voyages, 5, m. 

Hakluyt, Richard, a forerunner of 
colonization, 5 ; belief of, in a pas- 
sage to the Pacific, 6 ; stories of 
gold, 12 ; of mulberry trees, 76. 

Hakluyt's Discourse on Western 
Planting, 6, m. ; 94, n. i ; 97, n. 11 ; 
Voyages, 2 ; 5, m. ; 8, m. ; 12, m. ; 
23, n. 8. 

Hamor, Raphe, secretary under Dale, 
a signer of the Tragicall Relation, 
66, n. 9 ; True Discourse, 66, n. 9 ; 
68, n. 12 ; 70, n. 16 ; 95, n. 3. 

Hampton Court conference, 159 ; au- 
thorities on the, 182, n. i. 

Hanbury's Memorials, 157, n. i, n. 2 ; 
158, n. 3. 



Hancock, Thomas, the Luther of 
England, 125. 

Hanging clemency, 46 ; preferred to 
transportation to Virginia, 54 ; and 
to the old tyranny, 56. 

Hardwicke Papers, 238, m. 

Hariot's Briefe and True Report, 80, m. 

Harleian Miscellany, 240 m. 

Harrington's Nugse Antiquce, 116, m. ; 
161, m. ; 162, m. ; 182, n. i. 

Harrisse's, Plenry, John Cabot, the 
Discoverer of America, 21, n. i. 

Plartlib's Reformed Virginia Silk- 
worm, 79. 

Harvey, Sir John, sends expedition 
for gold, 13; Governor of Virginia, 
249 ; quarreled with Virginians, 
249 ; counter-revolution, 249. 

Hawkins, Jane, Mrs. Hutchinson an 
associate of, 340. 

Hawkins, Sir John, lands luckless sea- 
men in Mexico, 14. 

Playnes, Governor of Massachusetts, 
332 ; pronounced sentence against 
Williams, 347, n. i ; letter to Wil- 
liams while Governor of Connecti- 
cut quoted, 347, n. i. 

Health to the Gentlemanly Profession 
of Servingmen, 134, n. i. 

Hearne's Langtoft's Chronicle, 93, m. 

Hening's Statutes, 78, m. ; 79, m. ; 
97. n. 9. 

Henrietta Maria, Maryland named 
for, 245 ; godmother to Maryland, 
jealous of Calvert, 249. 

Henry, Prince, interested in Virginia 
colony, 43. 

Henry,WilliamWirt, Address, 63, n. 3. 

Hessey's Bampton Lectures, 139, n. 10. 

Hind's Making of the England of 
Elizabeth, 135, n. 3. 

Hinman's Antiquities, 347, n. 2. 

Hogs, brood, of the colony eaten, 38 ; 
wild, in the Bermudas, 41, 65, n. 6. 

Holinshed's Chronicles, 22, n. 5. 

Holland, tlie " mingle mangle of re- 
ligions " in. 164. 

Holmes's History of Cambridge, 31 8, 
m. ; 320, m. 

Home, Virginia for the first time a, 58. 

Home-makers sent to Virginia, 57, 58. 

Homesteads at Newtown sold to new- 
comers, 325, 347, n. 3. _ 

Hooft, Nederiandsche Historic, 312, 
n. 18. 

Hooker, Thomas, one of the greatest 



362 



The Bcgvincrs of a Nation. 



luminaries of the Puritans, 269 ; 
desire of his party to move to Con- 
necticut, 285, 315 ; set to dispute 
with Williams, 292 ; early life of, 
316 ; driven from his pulpit by 
Laud, 317 ; fled to Holland, 317 ; a 
company of his people settled at 
Newtown, 317; arrival at New- 
town, 319 ; rivalry with Cotton, 
320 ; somber theology of, 320 ; dif- 
ference between his teachings and 
those of Cotton, 321, 346, n. i ; 
theories of civil government more 
liberal than Cotton's, 322 ; limited 
the power of the magistrate, 322, 
347, n. 2 ; the real founder of Con- 
necticut, 325. 

Hornbeck on John Robinson, 15S, 
n. 3- 

Horses eaten, 38. 

Houses burned for firewood, 40. 

Hubbard's History of Massachusetts, 
308, n. 8 ; History of New England, 
207, m. ; 215, m.; 347, n. 3 ; testi- 
mony of, unreliable, 311, n. 17. 

Hudson, Henry, influenced by Cap- 
tain John Smith, seeks the South 
Sea, 9. 

Hudson River gold, 23, n. 7, 

Huguenots of La Rochelle, England 
allied with, 239. 

Humming birds exported, 18. 

Hundreds or plantations, 54, 55. 

Hunt, Robert, first minister in Vir- 
ginia, 90. 

Hunter, Rev. Joseph, on Shake- 
speare's Tempest, 65, n. 6. 

Hunter's Founders of New Plymouth, 
150, m.; 152, m.; 155, m. ; 170, m. 

Hutchinson, Mrs. Anne, an ardent 
disciple of Cotton in old Boston, 
329 : character of, 329, 330 ; " mas- 
terpiece of womens wit," 330 ; 
meetings for women opened by, 
330 ; doctrines of, 331 ; the very 
apostle of Cotton's doctrine, 333 ; 
brought to trial by her opponents, 
337 ; adroit defense, 338 ; con- 
demned by the General Court, 338 ; 
sentenced to banishment, 339 ; re- 
canted, but was excommunicated, 
339. 348, n. 8 ; her sons disfran- 
chised, 339 ; settled in Rhode 
Island with her party, 340 ; ac- 
cused of witchcraft by \Vinthrop, 
340 ; wild reports about, 340, 341 ; 



massacred by Indians at New 
Netherland, 341. 

Hutchinson on the Virginia Colony, 
186, n. 8. 

Hutchinson Papers, 215, m. ; 299, m. ; 
307, m.; 329, n. i. 

Hutchinson party partisans of Vane, 
332 ; arrogance of the, 333 ; Pastor 
Wilson condemned by, 333. 

Hutchinson's History of Massachu- 
setts Bay, 211, m. ; 337, m. 

Hutchinsonian controversy, the, 326, 
327 ; the debate waxed hot, 334. 

Hypocrites better than profane per- 
sons, 299. 

Idolatry, Puritanism a crusade against, 
118. 

Illusions of discoverers, 3, 75. 

Inclosures, effects of, 135, n. 5 ; for 
private not the publick good, 136, 
n. 5- 

Independency, tendency toward, 112, 
136, n. 6 ; foreshadowed at Frank- 
fort, 137, n. 6 ; dated back to reign 
of Mar)', 146 ; favored by Flemish 
Protestants, 15S, n. 2 ; Robinsonian, 
the established religion in New 
England, 215. 

Independents in early years of Eliza- 
beth's reign, 158, n. 2. 

Indian children, rewards to colonists 
for educating, 91. 

Indian conjurers laid spell on the 
coast, 178. 

Indian exhumed and eaten at James- 
town, 39. 

Indians plot destruction of the colo- 
nists, 8 ; curiosity regarding the, 15 ; 
desire to convert, 16, 90 ; kid- 
napped and exhibited, 17 ; attack 
those first landing in Virginia, 28 ; 
constant fear of attack from, 30 ; 
supply food to Jamestown, 31 , 
Smith trades with, 34, 36 ; devilish 
ingenuity in torturing, 38 ; outrage 
the dead, 38, 64, n. 4 ; slay gold 
hunters, 43 ; no danger from, while 
Dale was in charge, 47 ; taken to 
England by Dale, 49, 68, n. 10; 
unnecessary cruelty to, 64, n. 4 ; 
reverence for their sacred house, 64, 
n. 4 ; endowed school established 
for, 83, 91 ; schemes for educating 
obliterated, 92 ; treachery of, emu- 
lated by the settlers, 92 ; destruc- 



Index. 



363 



tion of, in Maryland and in Massa- 
chusetts divinely ordered, 247 ; 
riglit of the king to give away lands 
of, questioned, 274, 2S2, 2S3 ; land 
secured from, by purchase, 283. 

Industrial disturbance aids the Puri- 
tan movement, in. 

Infallibility of "godly " elders, 301. 

Ingram, Davy, crosses the continent, 
14 ; statement, 14, 23, n. 8. 

Injunctions by King Edward VI, 
13S, n. 9. 

Interludes sometimes played in 
churches, 129. 

Intolerance sanctioned by logic, 299. 

Iron works established at Falling 
Creek, 83 ; failure of, 96, n. 6. 

Isthmus in latitude 40°, belief in an, 
10. 

James I framed code of laws and or- 
ders for the Virginia colony, 26 ; 
Covnter-Blaste to Tobacco, 84 ; ob- 
stinacy of, 87 ; his accession raised 
the hopes of the Puritans, 159 ; 
paradoxical qualities of, 160 ; dia- 
lectic skill at Hampton Court con- 
ference, 160 ; refutes the hapless 
Puritans, 161 ; boasts that he had 
peppered the Puritans, 162, 182, n. 
I ; results of his folly, 162 ; would 
wink at but not publicly tolerate 
the Pilgrims, 170 ; refused guaran- 
tee of toleration, 173 ; friendship 
with George Calvert, 223 ; revenue 
from fines of lay Catholics, 238 ; 
Apologie for the Oath of Allegiance, 
238. 

James, Puritan minister in Mary- 
land, 253. 

James River discovered by the acci- 
dent of a storm, 27 ; settlement 
near the falls of the, 37. 

James River experiments, the, 25 ; 
their story the overture to the his- 
tory of life in the United States, 58. 

Jamestown, causes of suffering at, 13 ; 

V founded, 29 ; at first a peninsula, 

29 ; abandoned, 41 ; population in 

1616, 49 ; in 18S9, 59, n. I ; some 

drawings of, 60, n. i. 

Jamestown Company, the. See Vir- 
ginia Company, The. 

Jamestown emigrants instructed to 
explore rivers to the northwest, 9. 

Jesuits flock to England, 226 ; set 



free, 239 ; interested in migration 
to Maryland, 240 ; the provincial 
of the Society of Jesus favored tol- 
eration, 242 ; religious observances 
of, at sea, 243 ; conversion of non- 
Catholics in Maryland by, 246 ; 
fled to Virginia, 257. 

Jesus, the humane pity of, unknown 
to the laws and sermons of the 
time, 301, 313, n. 22. 

Johnson, Bradley T., Foundation of 
Maryland, 263, n. 15. 

Johnson, Edward, the bloodthirsty 
Massachusetts Puritan, 164 ; his 
Wonder-working Providence, 318, 
m. ; 320, m. ; 330, m. 

Johnson, Francis, voyage of, to Amer- 
ica, 167 ; pastor at Amsterdam, 
168. 

Johnston, Isaac, of Winthrop's com- 
pany, death of, 212. 

Jones, captain of The Mayflower, con- 
duct of, 177 ; identified with Jones 
of The Discovery, i£6, n. 7. 

Jones's, Rev. Hugh, Present State of 
Virginia, 183, n. 3. 

Josselyn's Rarities, 344, m. 

Judgment, present, not a binding law, 
18?, n. 6. 

Judgments, divine,' fear of, 19S. 

Kent Island, Claiborne's claim to, 
^254. 

Knowles's Life of Williams, 274, m. ; 
308, n. 9 ; the best of the older 
biographies, 311, n. 17. 

Knox, John, followers of, dispute 
with the Coxans at Frankfort, 105 ; 
not more a Sabbatarian than Cal- 
vin, 124. 

Labor, common-stock system of, at 
Jamestown, 26 ; abolished by dis- 
tribution of land, 56 ; failure of, at 
Plymouth, 179; evils of, 186, n. g. 

Labor, private, more productive than 
common-stock system, 49 ; prohib- 
ited on Sundays, 127. 

Laborers, twelve so-called, in the Vir- 
ginia colony, 27. 

Land, division of, in Virginia, 48, ^9, 
56, 68, n. 12. 

Land grants, various, in Virginia, 
based on the Grand Charter, 56, 
70, n. 15. 

Lane, Ralph, governor of Ralegh's 



364 



TJie Beginners of a Nation. 



first colony, 7, 21, n. 3 ; seeks gold 
and the South Sea, 8 ; account in 
Hakluyt, iii, 8, m. ; hopes for his 
Roanoke colony, 74 ; to Sydney and 
Walsingham, 74, m. 

Latitude of 40", belief ofti westward 
passage in, 9, 10. 

Laud, Archbishop, obliterated by 
Puritanism, 133 ; one great service 
of, to the world, 193 ; character of, 
193 ; fearless in peril, 195 ; dubbed 
" the father of New England," 196 ; 
Letter to Selden, 196 ; Abbott's ac- 
count of Laud's rise, 216, n. 2 ; fails 
to crush the Massachusetts Com- 
pany, 211 ; suppressing Puritanism, 
239 ; fall of, 240 ; non-conforming 
Puritans hunted from lectureships 
and chaplaincies by, 270 ; drove 
John Cotton to New England, 279 ; 
moving to vacate the Massachusetts 
charter, 2S2 ; made head of a com- 
mission to govern the colonies, 284; 
drove Hooker from his pulpit at 
Chelmsford, 317; preparations to 
control Massachusetts made by, 
343 ; asked to stop emigration to 
New England, 344; tries to com- 
pel Scots to use prayer book, 344. 

Laws, divine, moral, and martial, 
under which Dale oppressed Vir- 
ginia, 45, 70, n. 16 ; 132. 

Leah and Rachel, 79, m. ; 265, n. 25. 

Lederer, voyage of, from Virginia, 
II, m. 

Legislative body established by the 
Great Charter, 55. 

Leland, John, Itinerary, 152, m. 

Lenox, Duke of, territory assigned 
to, 259, n. 5. 

Letters of complaint intercepted, 47. 

Letters of Missionaries, 264, n. 17, 
n. 18. 

Leyden, Scrooby exiles remove to, 
166 ; Pilgrims set out from, 174. 

Liberty in religion congruous with 
civil peace, 315. 

Lingard, 238, m. 

Little Gidding, Ferrar's community at, 
92 ; devastated by the Puritans, 93. 

Liturgy, a, purified of human tradi- 
tion, 106 ; omitted in many parishes, 
142. 

London Separatists, 147 ; organize a 
church, 148 ; miserably persecuted, 
some flee to Amsterdam, 148. 



Long Island Sound, Dermer storm- 
driven into, 9. 

Long Island, English settlers on, 345. 

Lord's Prayer, repetition of the, 
thought dangerously liturgical, 117. 

Lotteries of the Virginia Company, 
69, n. 14 ; abolished, 53, 70, n. 14. 

Low Countries, toleration in the, 
163 ; condemned by Baylie, 164. 

Luther, Martin, on the Sabbath, 124. 

Machyn's Diary, 99, m. 

Magellan's Strait, 2, 9. 

Magistrates aided by clergy in Mas- 
sacliusetts, 266 ; men of unusual 
ability, 2&5 ; right of, to punish for 
a religious offense, denied by Wil- 
liams, 272, 286 ; or to regulate the 
orthodoxy of churches and the be- 
lief of individuals, 292, 309, n. 12 ; 
310, n. 13. 

Magna Charta, the, of America, 55. 

Maids by the shipload sent to James- 
town, 57 ; not coerced into going, 
72, n. 19. 

Maine, French driven out of, 50 ; first 
English colony in, 189 ; fishing vil- 
lages of, 345. 

Manchester, Duke of, papers, 71, n. 18 ; 
174, m. ; 184, n. 5. 

Manuscript Book of Instructions, 71, 
n. iS ; 72, n. 19 ; 80, m. ; 96, n. 6 ; 
97, n. 9 ; 232, m. 

Manuscript Records, Virginia Com- 
pany, 52, m ; 61, n. 3 ; 67, n. 9 ; 
69, n. 13, 14 ; 70, n. 15 ; 71, n. 18 ; 
72, n. 19 ; 81, m. ; 82, m. ; 95, n. 3 ; 
97, n. 9, 10 ; 172, m. ; 184, n. 4. 

Mar- Prelate tracts, the, 114; answers 
to the, 116; effects of the reaction 
against, 121. 

Marriage by a Roman priest invali- 
dated accniing land tenures, 237. 

Marsden's Early Puritans, 125. 

Martial law under Dale, 45 ; Sm.ylh's 
code of, 70, n. 16 ; 132. 

Martin, Sir William, on P.oger W'il- 
liams, 307, n. i. 

Martyr, Peter, Decade III, 24, n. 9. 

Maryland, Baltimore's projected colo- 
ny in, 236 ; change to, from Avalon, 
239 ; small migration to, 240 ; pol- 
icy of toleration in, 242, 250, 265, 
n. 25 ; committed to guardian an- 
gels, 243 ; arrival of the Catholic 
pilgrims, 244 ; ceremonies of the 



Index. 



365 



landing in, 244 ; said to have been 
named by King Cliarles, 245 ; called 
Colony of St. Maries, 245 ; efforts 
to convert the Protestants in, 246 ; 
openly a Catholic colony, 247, 264, 
n. 17 ; import tax on Catholic serv- 
ants and convicts, 248, 264, n. ig ; 
opposition to Maryland, 249 ; Puri- 
tan settlers invited, 252 ; civil wars 
of, 253, 254 ; Act of Toleration 
passed, 255 ; again a proprietary 
government under Calvert, 257 ; 
disastrous results of religious differ- 
ences in, 266. 

Maiyland Archives, 245, m. ; 262, n. 
10 ; 265, n. 21. 

Maryland Assembly too cunning to be 
trapped by Baltimore, 255. 

Maryland charter, ambiguity of the, 
designed, 225, 236, 251, 259, n. 4 ; 
262, n. II ; compared with charter 
of Avalon, 234 ; provisions of, 235, 
236 ; extensive powers granted by, 
236, 263, n. 12. 

Mass celebrated in defiance of law, 
226 ; abhorred by the Puritans in 
Avalon, 228. 

Massachusetts Bay, failure of commer- 
cial settlements on, iSg ; patent to 
lands in, granted to the Massachu- 
setts Company, 207. 

Massachusetts charter. Laud's effort 
to vacate the, 282, 284. 

Massachusetts colony, government 
under Endecott, 217, n. 7 ; people 
homogenous in religious affairs, 266 ; 
religious opinion, main source of 
disturbance in, 266, 267 ; self-con- 
sciousness of the, 278 ; preparations 
for resistance in, 284 ; failure as an 
agricultural colony, 320 ; three pro- 
found disturbances in, 326 ; in com- 
motion over the Hutchinson con- 
troversy, 335. 

Massachusetts Company, rise of the, 
igg, 207 ; first colony of, under John 
Endecott, 199, 207 ; second com- 
pany of emigrants, 203 ; fear that 
the charter might be revoked, 208 ; 
company and colony to be merged in 
one, 2og ; transfers its government 
and charter to Massachusetts Bay, 
210 ; the commercial corporation 
becomes a colonial government, 
211 ; the colonists believed they 
were founding a new church, 212. 



Massachusetts government, evolution 
of the, 207 ; first court of, at Charles- 
town, 210 ; later became represen- 
tative, 211 ; relieved from strain by 
the borough system, 276 ; a govern- 
ment of congregations, 308, n. 6 ; 
theocratical, 279 ; religious intoler- 
ance of the, 297, 349, n. g ; anoma- 
lous in character, 323 ; angered by 
Hooker's secession, 326. 

Massachusetts Historical Collections, 
310, n. 15 ; 318, m. ; 320, m. ; 347, 
n. I ; 348, n. 7. 

Massachusetts Records, 206, m. ; 285, 
m. ; 290, m. ; 291, m. ; 308, n. 11 ; 
310, n. 13, 17 ; 317, m. ; 320, m. ; 
337. m. 

Massacre by the Indians put an end 
to all projects, 84, 92. 

Masson's Life of Milton, 137, n. 6. 

Mather's Magnalia, 152, m. ; 154, m. ; 
217, n. 5 ; 328, m. ; authority to be 
disregarded, 311, n. 17. 

Maverick, Samuel, on Noddle's Is- 
land, 190; Descriptionof New Eng- 
land, 273, m. 

Maydstown laid off in Virginia, 72, 
n. ig. 

Mayflower, conduct of the captain of 
the, 177. 

Maynard to Laud, 344, m. 

May-poles, opposition to, 118 ; pole 
of St. Andrew Undershaft sawed 
up, iig ; law against May-poles, 
119 ; the frolics around charged 
with immorality, 120 ; Morton's, at 
Merrymount, 190, 201. 

Mediterranean Sea, a, looked for in 
the heart of America, 11. 

Meeting, last all-night, in Pastor Rob- 
inson's house, 175. 

Mennonites, Williams attracted to the 
doctrines of the, 312, n. 19 ; derived 
his broadest principles from the, 313, 
n. ig. 

Mercurius Americanus, 348, n. 6. 

Merrymount, Morton's dangerous set- 
tlement at, igo, 201, 216, n. i. 

Metals, the precious, the only recog- 
nized riches, 75. 

Mica mistaken for gold, 13, 30, 75. 

Migration, the great, to New England, 
ig6, 203. 

Millinary Petition, the, I5g. 

Millinery sins, regulations against, 
285. 



366 



The Bcghiners of a Nation. 



Mills's British India, 67, n. 9. 

Milton, John, learned Dutch from 
Roger Williams, 273. 

Mines, Mexican, reports of wealth of, 
brought support to Ralegh's under- 
taking, 74. 

Ministerial office never so reverenced 
as by Puritans, 33S. 

Ministers, two, over one church, 106 ; 
might prophesy, but not a woman, 
338. 

Missionaiy impulse, first, in the Eng- 
lish Church, 89, 94, n. i. 

Monatesseron, the earliest English, 

93- 

Montserrat, island of, settled by Cath- 
olics, 231, 232, 261, n. g. 

Months, scruples about the heathen 
names of the, 302. 

Morals, austerity in, 119 ; advance 
of, under Puritan influence, 121 ; 
lack of sense of proportion is a trait 
of the age, 130 ; regularity of, pur- 
chased at a great sacrifice, 342. 

More, Father Heniy, 263, n. 14. 

Morion, Thomas, and his deviltry, 
190, 201, 216, n. I ; Memorial, 177, 
m. ; New English Canaan, 216, n. i. 

Motives for founding English colo- 
nies, 73 ; commercial and senti- 
mental, 86 ; religious, 89, 1S9. 

Mount Desert, Jesuit settlement at, 
plundered, 47, 50. 

Mourt's Relation, 184, n. 4. 

Mouse and snake, battle between, 
277 ; interpretation of, by Pastor 
John Wilson, 277. 

Mouse nibbles a Book of Common 
Prayer, 278. 

Movements, significant, usually cra- 
dled in rustic mangers, 146. 

Mulberries first planted in England, 
76 ; law for promoting the raisnig 
of, in Virginia, 77 ; repealed, 79. 

Muskrat skins valued for their odor, 
19. 

Names, fanciful, of the Newfound- 
land coast, 225, 229. 

Names, Indian, of places changed, 
244. 

Nansemond, settlement at, 37 ; set- 
tlers driven from, 38. 

Narragansett Bay recommended to 
Williams by Winthrop, 293 ; pro- 
posal to remove to, alarmed the 



magistrates, 294 ; colony on, found- 
ed on the true principle, 316. 

Narragansett Club Publications, 135, 
n. 4 ; 268, m.; 307, n. 3, 4, 5; 311, 
n. 17. 

Naval stores, Virginia expected to 
produce, 82 ; efforts to procure, in 
Elizabeth's time, 95, n. 4. 

Neal's History of New England, 310, 
n. 14 ; History of the Puritans, 159, 
m. ; 226, m.; 239, m. 

Neill, E. D., on the social compact, 
183, n. 4; Founders of Maryland, 
262, n. II ; Virginia Company, 67, 
n. 9 ; 183, n. 2. 

Netherlands, indirect interest of the, 
in the Virginia colony, 44. 

New England, coast of, explored by 
Capt. John Smith, 37 ; shaped in 
Old England by Puritanism, 133 ; 
pioneers of, came from the Sepa- 
ratists, 141, 146; existence of, hung 
on a chain of accidents, 176 ; ele- 
ments of, 177 : early attempts to 
colonize, 178; early settlements in, 
189; great migration to, 196, 203 ; 
capital laws of, condemned by Wil- 
liams, 304. 

New England charter of 1620, 173. 

New England colonists deemed them- 
selves a chosen people, 278 ; ac- 
counted other colonists the Egyp- 
tians of the New World, 27S, 308, 
n. 7 ; held to an intolerant theoc- 
racy, 279 ; dispersions of the, 315 ; 
relief at disappearance of the last of 
the leaders, 342. 

New England Firebrand Quenched, 
301, m. 

New England Historical Gen. Reg., 
267 ; 307, n. I. 

New England Puritanism more ultra 
than Bownd, 132, 140, n. 3. 

New England traits due to special 
causes, 178. 

Newfoundland, failure of colony at, 
223, 224 ; Capt. Whitbourne's 
pamphlet on, 224 ; fanciful names 
in, 225 ; not a paradise in winter, 
229, 260, n. 7 ; value of the fish- 
eries, 261, n. 7- 

New France bubble ready to collapse, 
346. 

New Haven, Davenport and his com- 
pany planted colony at, 343 ; col- 
ony united with Connecticut by 



Index. 



\^7 



royal charter at the Restoration, 
343 ; stretching westward, 345. 

New Life of Virginea, 63, n. 3. 

New Plymouth, Sandys's plans for the 
foundation of, 88. 

Newport, Vice-Admiral, reporter of 
Virginia affairs, 44 ; threatened with 
the gallows by Dale, 44 ; warned 
against Archer, 64. 

Newtown, Hooker's company settled 
at, 317 ; intended for capital and 
palisaded, 31S ; superior to Boston 
in one regard, 318 ; discontent at, 
318, 319, 320; questions regarding 
boundary, 319 ; cattle-raising at, 
320 ; the church at, emigrated bod- 
ily to Connecticut, 325 ; court of 
elections held at, 335. 

New World, mirages of the, 2 ; dis- 
covered because it lay between 
Europe and the East Indies, 3 ; 
grotesque and misleading glimpses 
of the, 20. 

New York Colonial Documents, 6, m., 
43, m. 

New York Hist. Soc. Coll., 23, n. 7 ; 
second series, 70, n. 15 ; 80, m. 

Nichols's, Josias, Plea for the Inno- 
cent, 146, m. 

Nonconformists, severe measures 
against, 122 ; in the Church, 142. 

North Carolina, coast of, called \Vin- 
gandacon, 21, n. 3. 

Northey, Sir Edward, decision on the 
Maryland charter, 262, n. 11. 

Northwest passage, search for a, 4, 5, 
9, 10, II. 

Nova Albion, 259, n. 5. 

Nova Brittania, 82, m. 

Oath of allegiance, 241 ; emigration 
oath refused by Williams, 270 ; new 
oath for residents opposed by Wil- 
liams, 289 ; magistrates unable to 
enforce, 289. 

Ogle's Account of Maryland, 264, n. 
19. 

Oil to be distilled from walnuts, 83. 

Oldham, John, an adventurous man 
of lawless temper expelled from 
Plymouth, 324 ; led a small com- 
pany from Watertown, 324. 

Opossum, the, described by Purchas, 
18. 

Opposition, Puritanism the party of, 
no. 



Original Records of Colony of Vir- 
ginia, 78, m. 

Overston, sermons preached in, by 
unlicensed men, 142. 

Pacific Ocean, discovery of the, 3 ; 
belief in a passage to the, 4, 6 ; 
nearness to Florida, 6 : sought via 
the James River, 8 ; in latitude 40°, 
9, 10 ; via the Delaware, 10 ; prox- 
imity of, to Virginia, 10, 22, n. 6; 
to North Carolina, 11. 

Pagitt's Heresiography, 143, m. ; 14}, 
m. ; 157, n. i. 

Palfrey's History of New England, 
211, m. ; 218, n. 8. 

Palisades burned for firewood, 40. 

Paradox, the, of colonial religious or- 
ganization, 2S0. 

Parkinson, Marmaduke, explorer, 10. 

Parliamentary freedom, struggle for, 
87. 

Parties, the two great, of Protestant- 
ism, rise of, 106 ; results, 107 ; lines 
between, not sharply drawn at once, 
1 10 ; controversy between, grew 
more bitter, 114. 

Party, a moderate, lamented the ex- 
cesses of the extremists, 117. 

Passage to the Pacific Ocean sought, 
3, 4, 9, 10, 22, n. 5 ; 73, 74. See also 
Northwest Passage and Pacific 
Ocean. 

Patent, royal, validity of, questioned 
by Williams, 274, 281, 289, 308, 
n. 9 ; 309, n. 12. 

Patience, the, pinnace, built wholly 
of wood, 41. 

Paulus, Pieter, Verklaring der Unie 
van Utrecht, 312, n. 18. 

Pearce, Mistress, "near twenty years" 
in Virginia, 71, n. 18. 

Pearl fisheries in Virginia waters, 95, 
n. 3. 

Peckard's Life of Ferrar, 65, n. 5 ; 
87, m. ; 93, m. ; account of, 97, n, 
10 ; 100, m. 

Peirce, John, received a grant from 
the Virginia Company, 184, n. 4. 

Pequot war, Williams denounced 
slaughter of women and children 
in, 305 ; plan of campaign changed 
through a revelation, 338. 

Pequots dangerous on Connecticut 
River, 323. 

Percy, George, on the arrival at Vir- 



368 



The Beginners of a Nation. 



ginia, 28 ; on the sufferings at 
Jamestown, 30 ; increased the hos- 
tility of the Indians, 3S, 64, n. 4 ; 
inefficiency as governor, 44, 60, n. 
2 ; succeeded by Gates, loi. 

Percy to Northumberland, 46, m. ; 
Trewe Relacyon, 40, m. ; 60, n. 2 ; 
64, n. 4 ; 65, n. 5. 

Perfect Description of Virginia, 11, m. 

Perfume to be extracted from the 
muskrat, 95, n. 3. 

Persecution in Queen Mary's time, 
103 ; spirit of, pervaded every party, 
113 ; of the Separatists, 141 ; begot 
Separatism, 154, 155 ; new storm 
of, 163, 182, n. I ; starts agitation 
for emigration to Virginia, i63, 183, 
n. 2. 

Peter, Hugh, rebuked Cotton for de- 
fending Mrs. Hutchinson, 337 ; 
browbeat Mrs. Hutchinson's wit- 
nesses, 338 ; returned to England 
and favored toleration, 348, n. 7. 

Petition to House of Lords, 345, m. 

Pharisaism of the rigid Sabbath, 133. 

Philosophical Transactions, 78, m. ; 
79, m. 

Pilgrims brought Barrowism to New 
England, 148 ; Scrooby and Auster- 
feld cradles of the, 149 ; no tradition 
of, lingers at Scrooby, 150 ; common 
country folk, 151 ; flee to Amster- 
dam, 164 ; theological agitations 
drive them to Leyden, 165 ; dan- 
ger of extinction, 166 ; intermar- 
riages with the Dutch, 167 ; emigra- 
tion to Virginia under consideration, 
168, 182, n. 2 ; questioned whether 
to be Dutch or English colonists, 
i6g ; ask aid of Edwin Sandys, in 
securing religious liberty, 169 ; re- 
ceive two charters, a general order, 
and a liberal patent from the Vir- 
ginia Company, 172 ; their Com- 
pact under the general order, 173 ; 
departure from Leyden, 174 ; forced 
to land, select Plymouth, 177 ; suf- 
fered for their ignorance of colony- 
planting, 173 ; honor due, 186, n. 
8 ; "stepping stones toothers," 188 ; 
slender success of, stimulated com- 
mercial settlements, 189 ; the " large 
patent " granted to the, through in- 
fluence of Sandys, 206 ; influence 
on the Massachusetts colony, 212. 

Piscataqua, settlement on the, 189. 



Plaine Declaration of Barmudas, 65, 
n. 6. 

Planting, the first, at Jamestown, 29. 

Plants of every clime believed to grow 
in Virginia, 82. 

Plays, performance of, on Sundays pro- 
hibited, 127. 

Pledge signed at Cambridge by Win- 
throp's party, 209. 

Plymouth, ceremony observed at, 103 ; 
the landing at, 177 ; horrors of 
Jamestown repeated at, 179 ; the 
second step in the founding of a 
great nation, 181 ; Roger Williams 
" prophesied " at, 272 ; people 
styled "mungrell Dutch," 273 ; dis- 
turbed by Williams, 274 ; gives 
him a letter of dismissal to Salem, 

275- 

Pocahontas, 33, 35, 37 ; converted and 
wedded to Rolfe, 49 ; taken to 
England, 49, 68, n. 10 ; captured by 
Argall, 50 ; dies leaving an infant 
son, 52. 

Pocahontas story, the, 63, n. 3. 

Pomp and display at the court of Eliza- 
beth, 98 ; imitation of, objected to 
by the Puritans, 100, 134, n. 2. 

Popham, Captain George, attempt of, 
to colonize in Maine, 178. 

Port Royal, map showing strait near, 
8, 21, n. 4. 

Pory's Report, 70, n. 15 ; 77, m. 

Pots and Phettiplace, narrative, 35, 
61, n. 2. 

Powhatan releases Captain Smith, 33, 

H' 35-. 

Precinct in Virginia asked for by Cal- 
vert, 229. 

Presbyterianism developed underCart- 
wright, 112, 136, n. 6 ; swept out by 
Whitgift, 122 ; hoped for in New 
England, 213. 

Price of commodities, rise of, pro- 
moted voyages, 22, n. 5. 

Private interest, even a slave's patch 
of, put life into Virginia, 48. 

Proceedings Mass. Hist. Soc, Wheel- 
wright's sermon in, 331, m. 

Proceedings of Virginia Assembly, 
80, m. 

Property, community of. See Com- 
munism; Labor. 

Prophet, the, and the reformer, 306. 

Proportion, lack of sense of, peculiar 
to zealots and polemics, 130. 



Index. 



369 



Protestant colonists at St. Christo- 
pher's oppose Catholic fellow-colo- 
nists, 231 ; no Protestant minister or 
worship on ships coming to Mary- 
land, 242. 

Protestant Nunnery, Ferrar's commu- 
nity at Little Gidding called the, 
93- 

Protestantism, English, rise of the two 
great parties of, 106, 107 ; contro- 
versy grew more bitter, 1 14 ; incor- 
ruptible in Virginia, 231. 

Protestantism on the Continent near- 
ly wrecked, 198. 

Protestants, English, find refuge on 
the Continent, 104 ; compromises at 
home, dissensions in exile, 104 ; the 
ultra wing tended to democratic 
church government, 106 ; return 
after death of Mary, 107 ; their 
petty squabbles develop into bitter 
feuds and struggles, 107 ; wide- 
spread results, 107 ; Baltimore or- 
ders no scandal nor offense to be 
given to, 250 ; his policy of concili- 
ation toward, in Maryland, 251. 

Protestants on the Continent become 
Roman Catholics, 19S. 

Providence Plantation founded by 
Williams, 296 ; fell into inevitable 
disorders, 315 ; an example of the 
largest liberty in religion congruous 
with civil peace, 315. 

Provincetown Harbor, the Mayflower 
in, 177. 

Public Records OOice Colonial Pa- 
pers, 54, m. 

Pullein's Culture of Silk, 95, n. 2. 

Punishments, various, inflicted by 
Dale, 46. 

Purchas his Pilgrimes, 2, 12, m.; iS, 
22, n. 6 ; 24, n. 9, n. 10 ; 28, m. ; 
29, m. ; 30, m. ; 64, n. 3 ; 65, n. 6 ; 
69, n. 14 ; 80, m. ; 95, n. 3 ; 96, n. 
6 ; 97, n. 9 ; 102, m. 

Purchas's stories of silver and gold, 
12. 

Puritan, the, never easy unless he was 
uneasy, 253. 

Puritan community, cost of the good 
results attained in a, 342. 

Puritan conscience, the, let loose 
against old superstitions, iig. 

Puritan divines in high church posi- 
tions, 143. 

Puritan exodus, the great, i83, 239. 

25 



Puritan opinions condemned, 103. 

Puritan pietists, a new school of, 327. 

Puritanism, rise and development of, 
98 ; an outgrowth of the time, 103 ; 
an effort to escape from formalism, 
109 ; gathered strength as the lead- 
ing opposition, iii ; becomes dog- 
matic, 112 ; evolutionary, 117 ; im- 
portance of secondary development 
of, 120 ; apparent decline of, 121 ; be- 
gun with Elizabeth, seemed doomed 
to die with her, 122 ; evolves new 
issues, 123, 137, n. 7 ; opposed to 
Arminianism, 133 ; set up the Com- 
monwealth, 133 ; threatened de- 
struction of, at Leyden, 167 ; under 
James I the party of opposition, 
igi ; conservative under Charles I, 
192 ; unamiable traits of, manifested 
in Endecott, 202 ; course of events 
in England adverse to, 203 ; sup- 
pression of, by Laud, 239 ; diver- 
gencies from, in Massachusetts, 267 ; 
existed and grew through prudent 
compromises, 268, 269 ; Salem, 
north pole of, 271 ; condemned by 
its false and harsh ideals, 300 ; char- 
acter of, 300, 301, 342 ; an ascetic 
system of external duties and ab- 
stentions, 327. 

Puritans, why so called, 106, 135, 
n. 4. 

Puritans, English, contempt of the, 
for aesthetic considerations, 94 ; rev- 
erence for Bible precepts, 109 ; 
would have no surplices, no liturgy, 
109 ; banished the symbol with the 
dogma, III ; importance of efforts 
toward the regulation of conduct, 
120; dubbed Martinists, 121; dif- 
ferences forgotten in the conflict 
with the Episcopal party, 137, n. 6 ; 
omitted the liturgy, 142 ; present 
Millinary Petition to James 1, 159 ; 
at the Hampton Court conference, 
160, 181, n. I ; not eager to join 
Separatist settlers, 188 ; a power- 
ful party, 192 ; motives for emigra- 
tion, 197 ; fear of divine judgments, 
198 ; barred from all public action, 
203 ; plan for a Puritan church in 
America, 204 ; carried out through 
the Massachusetts Company, 212 ; 
differences among the, 213 ; exhila- 
rating effect of freedom from con- 
straints, 213 ; raging against indul- 



370 



The Bcgitincrs of a Nation. 



gence to Romanists, 235, 238 ; be- 
lieved the church under Laud would 
become Roman Catholic, 239 ; 
dropped " saint " from geograph- 
ical names, 244 ; rise of, to power, 
240 ; dominant in Parliament, 252 ; 
could not be induced to leave New 
England for Maryland, 252 ; perse- 
cuted in Virginia, leave there for 
Maryland, 253 ; at peace with Cath- 
olics in Maryland, 254; their ideas 
rampant in Maryland, 257 ; send 
munitions of war to New England, 
2S4 ; conceived of religion as dif- 
ficult of attainment, 32S. 
Puritans of the Massachusetts colony 
not Separatists, 212 ; pathetic fare- 
well to the Church of England, 213; 
persuaded to the Plymouth view of 
church government, 215 ; leaving 
England, 239 ; emigration to New 
England, 240. 

Quakers put to death by Endecott, 
202 ; protected in Maryland, 257. 

Raccoon, the, called a monkey, 19, 
24, n. 10. 

Radical and conservative, difference 
between, constitutional, 109. 

Rain, results of Puritan and Indian 
prayers for, 16. 

Ralegh, Sir Walter, sends explorers 
and colonists, 7 ; History of the 
World, 21, n. 3 ; distmsts Indian 
tales, 21, n. 3 ; a lifelong opponent 
of Spain, 73. 

Rapin, 239, m. 

Rappahannocks, dress of the chief of 
the, 23. 

Ratcliffe, enemy of Capt. John Smith, 
37 ; ambuscaded and tortured to 
death, 38, 64, n. 4 ; follower of 
Archer, 64, n. 3 ; cruel to the sav- 
ages, 64, n. 4. 

Ration, a day's, pitiful allowance for, 
30, 46. 

Records of Virginia Company de- 
stroyed, 54, 71, n. 17. 

Recreations on Sunday, scruples re- 
garding, 127 ; forbidden by Dr. 
Bownd, 129. 

Reformers, the, of the sixteenth cen- 
tury declared against a priesthood, 
123 ; and a Sabbath, 124. 



Relatyon of the Discovery of our River, 
29, m. 

Religion, motive to colonization, 220. 

Religious enthusiasts and the Angli- 
can church, 144. 

Religious ferments, leavening effects 
of, 121. 

Religious freedom a cherished prin- 
ciple of Roger Williams, 2S6 ; es- 
taljlished at Providence, 296. 

Religious liberty befriended by few, 
detested by Catholic and Protestant, 
298. 

Religious service, attendance at, 
should be compulsory, 299. 

Report of Record Com., 329 m. 

Residents, new oath of fidelity for, 
289 ; successfully opposed by Wil- 
liams, 289, 309, n. 12 ; mercenary 
inducement offered to, to take the 
freeman's oath, 308, n. 11. 

Retainers, brilliant trains of, 99. 

Rhode Island, a secondary colony, 
220 ; importance of the, 315. 

Rich, Lord. See Warwick, second 
Earl. 

Rich's, Barnabee, Honestie of this 
Age, 96, n. 8. 

Rites, resistance to, an article of faith, 
103. 

Ritual, a purified, preferred by the 
extreme Protestants, 106, 135, n. 3. 

Ritual, the antique, desire to change 
as little as possible, 106, 135, n. 3. 

Rivalry with Spain, 73. 

Roanoke Island, first colony on, 7 ; 
Lane's hopes for, 74. 

Roanoke River, story of source of, 7. 

Robert's Social History of the South- 
ern Counties, 125, m.; 127, m.; 129, 
m. 

Robinson hanged and quartered for 
extorting money from "pressed" 
maidens, 72, n. 19. 

Robinson, John, joins the Separatists 
at Scrooby, 155 ; character and in- 
fluence of, 156, 158, n. 3 ; leads the 
Scrooby church to Amsterdam, 164 ; 
to Leyden, 165 ; idea of forming a 
new state, 167 ; prayer and last 
words at departure of the Pilgrims, 
175, 185, n. 6 ; advised union rather 
than division, 176; farewell letter 
of, 1S5, n. 5 ; liberality and breadth 
of view, 176, 185, n. 6 ; held to " tol- 
eration of tolerable opinions," 298. 



Index. 



371 



Robinson's, John, Justification, 157, n. 
I, n. 2 ; 2ig, n. 9. 

Rogers, Thomas, opponent of Green- 
ham and Bownd, 139, n. 11. 

Rogers's Preface to Thirty-nine Arti- 
cles, 122, m. ; 139, n. 11 ; 143, m. 

Rolfe, John, married Pocahontas. 68, 
n. 10 ; planted first tobacco at 
Jamestown, 84. 

Rolfe's Relation, 70, n. 16 ; 71, n. 17, 
n. i8. 

Rosier's True Relation, 17, m. 

" Rowdies " assault the Jesuits, 265, 
n. 24. 

Royal Hist. MS. Comm.. 88, m. 

Royal Hist. MS. Com. Kept., 345, m. 

Rushworth's Hist. Coll., 216, n. 2, n. 
3 ; petition in, 226, m. ; 235, m. ; 
344. 

Rustics, the, of Scrooby and its neigh- 
borhood, 150, 151; influence of 
Brewster on, 153; of John Robin- 
son, 157. 

Rymer's Fcedera, 229, m.; 238, m. 

Sabbath, the, as a holy day objected 
to by Luther and Calvin, 124 ; rise 
of the Puritan, 124 ; Sunday first 
so called in literature, 126 ; passion 
for a stricter, 130 ; doctrine of a 
Christian, resented, 131, 139, n. 11 ; 
in Scotland, 132, 139, n. 12 ; of 
deepest hue in New England, 132, 
140, n. 13. 

Sabbath-breakers, punishments threat- 
ened against, 138, n. 8. 

Sabbath-keeping, early Puritan ideal 
of, 127 ; pushed to its extreme, 130 ; 
new zeal for, promoted morals, 131 ; 
rigid, a mark of the faithful, 132. 

Sadleir, Mrs., indorsement of, on 
Williams's letter to, 268, m. 

Sainsbury's Calendar, 67, n. 9 ; 207, 
ra. ; 262, n. 9 ; 344, m. ; 345, ni. 

Salem, north pole of Puritanism, 271 ; 
protest of the General Court against 
Williams as minister at, 271 ; at- 
tached to Williams and refractory 
toward the authorities at Boston, 
280 ; made Williams teacher, 284 ; 
deputies turned out of court in 
punishment, 291 ; indignation at 
Williams's banishment, 293. 

Salem church, organization of the, 200. 

Salisbury, the Dean of, attacked by 
Mar-Prelate, 115. 



Salvetti, correspondence on Calvert's 
resignation, 260, n. 6. 

Sampson, Thomas, letter to Calvin, 
135. n. 3. 

Sandy Beach, no trace of, 59. 

Sandys, Edwin, Archbishop of York, 
letter of, 137, n. 7 ; transferred 
manor place at Scrooby to his son 
Samuel, 153, 170. 

Sandys, Sir Edwin, interested in the 
Virginia Company, 54 ; approved 
Dale's course, 67, n. 9 ; arrested, 
69, n. 13 ; 89 ; chosen governor of 
Virginia Company, 71, n. 17 ; 88, 
170; proposed sending maids to 
Virginia, 71, n. 18 ; leader of the 
company, 87, 89, 170 ; established 
representative government in Vir- 
ginia, 88 ; plans for foundation of 
New Plymouth, 88 ; sketch of life 
of, in Brown's Genesis of the United 
States, 97, n. 10 ; tried to secure 
toleration for the Leyden people, 
170 ; one of the fathers of repre- 
sentative government in America, 
173 ; charges against, 174, 184, n. 
5 ; parliamentary antagonist of Cal- 
vert, 221 ; in disfavor at court, 222 ; 
Virginians friendly to, 230. 

Sandys, George, would seek the South 
Sea overland, 10, 11 ; name ap- 
pended to The Tragicall Relation, 
66, n. 9 ; in charge of manufactur- 
ing schemes, 83. 

Sandys, Sir Samuel, owned manor 
place at Scrooby, 153, 170. 

Sassafras root exported, 45, 68, n. 10 ; 
68, n. II. 

Savage life eagerly observed by the 
English, 29. 

Sawmills built in Virginia, 82. 

Scharf's History of Maryland, 23, n. 7. 

Schism esteemed the deadliest of sins, 
142, 197. 

Scotch settlement in Newfoundland, 
224, 258, n. 3. 

Scot's Magazine, ii, m. 

Scrambler, Bishop of Peterborough, 
to Burghley, 142, m. 

Scriptures, reverence for the letter of 
the, 144. 

Scrooby, the cradle of the Pilgrims, 
149 ; a region noted for religious 
zeal, 150 ; no tradition of the Pil- 
grims at, 150; called "the meane 
townlet" by John Leland, 152; 



372 



The Beginners of a Nation. 



owners of manor place at, 153 ; the 
church at, 154, 155. 

Seamen, threats of brutal, 177. 

Seekers, the, a sect, the last reduction 
of Separatism, 303 ; in New Eng- 
land, probably through influence 
from Holland, 303 ; in England 
as early as 1617, 304 ; "a Seeker of 
the best Sect next to a finder," 314, 
n. 24. 

Seekonk River, Williams removes 
from, to Providence, 296. 

Semi-Separatists, the, 143. 

Separatism and the Scrooby church, 
141 ; promoted by persecution, 
144 ; rise of, 146 ; divergencies in 
direction of, 267 ; protest by with- 
drawal of communion a fundamen- 
tal principle of, 271. 

Separatist, Roger Williams conscien- 
tiously a, 270. 

Separatist tendencies of Skelton, 271. 

Separatist tone of Pioneer church of 
Massachusetts at Salem, 271. 

Separatists, number of the, 136, n. 6 ; 
importance of the, 141 ; the ad- 
vance guard of Puritanism, 141 ; 
regarded as criminals by the Puri- 
tans, 142 ; causes of growth of the, 
144 ; idealists, 144 ; rise of the, 
146 ; meetings of, in London, 147 ; 
in Amsterdam, 14S ; one vigorous 
society of, in the north, 149 ; the 
Scrooby church of, organized, 154 ; 
all-day meetings at Brewster's 
manor house, 155 ; new persecution 
of the, 163 ; the Scrooby church 
resolve to flee to Holland, 163, 164 ; 
petition for leave to settle in Can- 
ada, 167 ; classed with criminals 
by 13acon, 171 ; held their opinions 
in a state of flux, 186, n. 6. 

Servingman, the, not a menial, 134, 
n. I. 

Servingmen in livery, gg, 134, n. i. 

Settlements, sixteen, in Massachu- 
setts, 275 ; life in the settlements, 
276. 

Settlers emulate the treachery of the 
Indians, 92 ; individual, 190. 

Shakespeare's good fortune to live in 
a dramatic age, gg. 

Shepard, Thomas, a new congrega- 
tion led by, 325 ; letter of, quoted, 
348, n. 5 ; Theses Sabbaticje, 140, 
n. 13 ; Memoirs in Young, 328, m. 



Sheriffs had many liveried servants, 
gg, 134, n. i. 

Ship carpenters sent to the James 
River, 83. 

Silk, craze for, in England, 76, 77, 
i6g ; wearing of, prohibited in the 
colony, 78. 

Silk culture attempted in England, 
76 ; in Virginia, 76, 77 ; causes of 
failure, 77, 78 ; renewed efforts for, 
78, 7g, 83 ; authorities on these ef- 
forts, gs, n. 3. 

Silk-grass craze, the, 7g. 

Silk manufacturing established in 
England, 77. 

Silkworms' eggs, hatching, in one's 
pocket or bosom, 78, g5, n. 2. 

Skelton, minister at Salem, 271 ; ex- 
treme Congregationalism and Sep- 
aratist tendencies of, 271 ; death 
of, 2S3. 

Sloane manuscripts, British Museum, 
22, n. 4. 

Smith, Captain John, a trastworthy to- 
pographer, g, 34 ; captured by In- 
dians, g ; views of geography of the 
continent, 22, n. 6 ; becomes leader 
at Jamestown, 31, 36 ; his charac- 
ter, 31, 32, 33 ; story of his own 
life, 32, 33 ; the Jonah and Ulysses 
of his time, 33 ; explorations and 
narrative, 34, 35, 36 ; overthrown, 
36 ; accused of design to wed Po- 
cahontas, 37, 51 ; later years, 37 ; 
foresight of America's future, 37 ; 
disabled by an accident, 37, 60, n. 
2 ; sent home under charges, 37, 
60, n. 2 ; accused of advising In- 
dians to attack settlers at the Falls, 
37, 60, n, 2 ; a typical American 
pioneer, 38 ; account of his writ- 
ings, 61, n. 3 ; commended by the 
Virginia Company, 61, n. 3 ; given 
to romance in narration, 62, n. 3 ; 
his practical writings and wise 
speeches, 62, n. 3 ; examples of his 
exaggeration, 63, n. 3 ; Thomas 
Fuller's judgment of, 63, n. 3 ; au- 
thorities in the debates about, 63, 
n. 3 ; refusal to share his power, 
6.t, n. 4 ; captured by the French, 
173. 

, Generall Historie, 22, n. 6 ; 27, 

m. ; 34, m. ; 35, 36, m. ; 61, n. 3 ; 66, 
n. g; g5, n. 3. 

, New Life of Virginia, 27, m. 



Index. 



373 



Smith, Oxford Tract, 34, m. ; 35, 36, 
ni. ; 42, m. ; 61, n. 3 ; 64, n. 3. 

, True Relation, 61, n. 3. 

Smyth, John, the Separatist, migrated 
from Gainsborough, 150; continu- 
ally searching for truth, 186, n. 6. 

Smyth, Sir Thomas, governor of Vir- 
ginia Company, 70, n. 16 ; resigna- 
tion, 71, n. 17 ; aroused the king's 
opposition to Sandys, 87 ; resigned, 
83 ; sorrows of the colony under, 
200 ; faction of, 230 ; defense, 67, 
n. 9. 

Somers, Sir George, wrecked on the 
Bermudas, 40 ; builds two vessels 
and takes provisions to Virginia, 
41 ; returns to the Bermudas, 41 ; 
death of, 42 ; Somers or Summer 
Islands named from, 65, n. 6. 

South Sea delusion, the, 6, 7, 8 ; an 
overland route to, 10 ; behind the 
mountains, 75 . See also Pacific 
Ocean. 

Southampton, Earl of, interested in 
the Virginia Company, 54 ; threat- 
ened by the Warwick party, 69, 
n. 13 ; really in power, 71, n. 17 ; 
procures silkworm "seed," 77; 
elected governor of the company, 
89 ; imprisoned, 89 ; one of the 
fathers of representative govern- 
ment in America, 173 ; Virginians 
friendly to, 230. 

Southwest passage, conjectures of a, 
22, n. 5. 

Spain, rivalry with, the motive for 
planting English colonies, 73 ; Eng- 
land's jealousy toward, 74, 94, n. i ; 
lavish of gifts to English courtiers, 
223 ; made England relax penal 
laws against English recusants, 
238. 

Sj^anish example, the influence of, on 
English projects, 73 ; fishing-boats 
to be seized at Newfounde lande, 
94, n. i; jealousy of Virginia, 94, 
n. I. 

Spanish match, the, favored by Cal- 
vert, 226, 227, 258, n. 2. 

Speed's Prospect, 24, n. 10. 

Spelman's Relation, 60, n. 2. 

Spices, passion for, in Europe, 22, n. 5. 

Spirit of the age, escape from the, diffi- 
cult, 133. 

Squirrels, flying, 18. 

Standish, Captain Miles, escorts the 



governor to church on Sundays, 
103. 

Star-Chamber censures, 203, 216, n. 3; 
Roger Williams as a lad employed 
by the, 268 ; harsh penalties for 
Separatists, 270. 

State church, notion of, not easily got 
rid of, 112. 

St. Christopher's Island sought by 
Catholic refugees, 231. 

Stephen, Sir, denounced May-poles 
as idols, 118 ; wanted names of 
days of the week changed, 118. 

Stith's History of Virginia, 51, m. ; 
182, n. 2. 

Stoughton retracted, 2go, 291 ; pres- 
sure put on, 297. 

Strachey's Historic of Travaile into 
Virginia, 24, n. 10 ; 36, m. ; 59, n. 
I ; 64, n. 4 ; 65, n. 7 ; 95. n. 5 ; 97, 
n. 9 ; 102, m. ; True Reportory, 65, 
n. 6. 

Strafford, friend of George Calvert 
and his son, 249. 

Strafford Papers, 241, m.. ; 263, n. 13. 

Strait, a, sought to the South Sea, 4, 
6, 8, 9. 

Strasburg and Zurich, cities of refuge 
for conservatives, 104. 

Strasburg reformers attempt to reform 
church at Frankfort, 105. 

Straus's Life of Roger Williams, 308, 
n. 6 ; 311, n. 17. 

Stubbes's Philip, Anatomic of Abuses, 
100, m.; 119, 127, 134, n. 2 ; 135, n. 5, 

Succession, apostolic, of churchly or- 
der and ordinance the mainspring 
of high-churchism, 302. 

Svmme and Svbstance. See Barlow. 

Sumner, George, on John Robinson, 
158, n. 3. 

Sumptuary laws, 75. 

Sunday had sanctity of a church feast 
before the Refonnation, 125 ; Eng- 
lish reformers retained the Catholic, 
125 ; first called Sabbath in litera- 
ture, 126; scruples regarding recrea- 
tions on, 127; brutally cruel sports 
on the old English, 129 ; strict ob- 
servance of, carried to New Eng- 
land, 132 ; in the middle ages, 138, 
n. 8 ; legislation on, rare before the 
Reformation, 138, n. 8 ; in time of 
Edward VI, 138, n. 9 ; sabbatical 
character of, denied, 140, n. 13. See 
also Sabbath. 



374 



The Beginners of a Nation. 



Sunday fishing, juries inquire intxj, 

125- 

Sunday morning ceremony at Plym- 
outh, 103. 

Sunday-Sabbath, theory of a, not con- 
fined to the Puritans, 132 ; Augus- 
tine on, in the fifth century, 137, n. 
8 ; 140, n. 13. 

Surplices begin to be used in Vir- 
ginia, 183, n. 3. 

Susan Constant, the ship, 25. 

Sutton's Hospital founded by legacy, 
which Coke defended, later known 
as Charter-House School, 268. 

Swift, Lindsay, on the early election 
sermons, 313, n. 22. 

Symonds, Dr. William, editor of sec- 
ond part of Smith's Oxford Tract, 
61, n. 3. 

Synod, the, of 1637, 336, 346, n. i. 

Tales, extravagant, of the Indians, 7, 
8 ; Ralegh distrusts, 21, n. 3. 

Taylor's Observations and Travel from 
London to Hamburg, 46, m. 

Tempest, Shakespeare's, 17 ; sug- 
gested by the wreck of Gates and 
Somers, 65, n. 6. 

Tenant, the copy-hold, driven to dis- 
tress, III. 

Tenantiy, the suffering, Puritans make 
common cause with, iii, 135, n. 5. 

Theater, passionate love of the, 99. 

Theocracy, instability of a, 326. 

Thomas Aquinas, St., on the fourth 
commandment, 138, n. 8. 

Thurloe, 263, n. 13. 

Timber sought in Virginia, 82. 

Tobacco, profitable cultivation of, in 
Virginia, 49, 84 ; exported, 63, n. 
10, n. II ; 96, n. 7 ; more profitable 
than silk-raising, 78 ; culture of, 
forbidden, 81 ; King James's Covn- 
ter-Blaste to, 84; John Rolfe planted 
the first, at Jamestown, 84 ; heavy 
duties on, 85, 96, n. 8 ; seven thou- 
sand shops in London, 97, n. 8 ; in- 
feriority of Indian, 97, n. 9 ; large 
profits from, 231 ; public use of, 
forbidden in Massachusetts, 285. 

Toleration, the Baltimore policy, 242, 
263, n. 15 ; principle of, formulated, 
254 ; Act of, passed in 1649, 255, 
256, 257 ; intolerable to the rulers 
of "the Bay," 297; limited and 
qualified at Amsterdam, 298 ; de- 



cried as a great crime by all the 
world, 298 ; a beneficent result of 
commerce, 298, 312, n. 18. 

Tortures, legal, examples of, 46, 67, n. g. 

Town government, the principal fea- 
ture of civil organization, 325. 

Town system, the, 275. 

Trade with the Indians by Captain 
John Smith, 34 ; suspended after 
Smith's departure, 38 ; renewed by 
Capt. Argall, 50. 

Tragicall Relation, 40, m. ; 56, m. ; 
66, n. 9 ; 68, n. 12. 

Trainbands drilled, 2S4. 

Travel, taste for books of, 2. 

Treasure received by Spain from 
America influenced English colo- 
nial projects, 73 ; wrought mischief 
to England, 94, n. i. 

True Declaration of the Estate of the 
Colony of Virginia, 40, m. ; 56, m. ; 
65, n. 5, n. 8. 

Trumbull's Blue Laws, 347, n. 2. 

Tucker, Daniel, builds boat at James- 
town, 39. 

Underhill, Captain, sent after Wil- 
liams, 295. 

Unicorn, reported find of the, 19, 24, 
n. 10. 

Uniformity not possible, 109. 

Upper House, dissension concerning 
power of the, in Massachusetts, 286. 

Utopia, the religious, attempted in 
New England, 342. 

Van der Donck's New Netherland, 
23, n. 7. 

Van Meteren, Nederlandsche Historic, 
312, n. 18. 

Vane, Sir Henry, the younger, fa- 
vored the Antinomians, 267 ; an 
ardent Puritan, 332 ; arrives in 
Boston ami is elected governor, 
332 ; a disciple of Cotton, 333 ; de- 
feat of, 336 ; leaves the colony, 337. 

Vaughan's Golden Fleece, 261, n. 7. 

Vessel, the first Virginia, built by 
Captain Argall, 50. 

Vestments objected to, in reign of Ed- 
ward VI, 103 ; bitter debates about, 
108 ; ceased to be abhorrent, 123. 

Virginia Assembly petitions the king, 
56; proceedings of the first, 70, n. 15. 

Virginia colony, the, 8 ; emigrants set 
sail, 25 ; code of laws and orders, 



Index. 



375 



26 ; character of the emigrants, 27 ; 
arrival, 27 ; first meetings with the 
Indians, 28 ; the winter of misery, 
29 ; fear of attack from the Indians, 
30 ; food bought of the Indians, 
31 ; five hundred colonists arrive 
under Archer and Ratclifte, 36 ; 
settlements at Nansemond and the 
falls of the James River, 37; famine 
of i6og-'io, 38 ; only sixty sur- 
vivors in June, 1610, 40 ; arrival of 
Gates and Somers, 40 ; Jamestown 
abandoned, 41 ; arrival of De la 
Warr, 41 ; De la Warr's govern- 
ment, 42 ; flight of De la Warr, 43 ; 
second lease of life, 43 ; inefficient 
government of George Percy, 44 ; 
martial law and slavery under 
Thomas Dale, 45 ; ten men escape, 
47 ; Dale's services, 47 ; private gar- 
dens allowed, 48 ; tobacco cultivated, 
49 ; Argall's government and treach- 
ery, 50-52 ; the Great Charter, 1618, 
55> 173 > joy ^t its receipt, 56 ; 
feared re-establishment of the old 
tyranny, 56, 70, n. 16 ; wives sup- 
plied, 57 ; the first homes, 58 ; 
whole number of colonists, 58 ; four 
fifths perished, 59 ; petition to the 
king, 65, n. 5 ; began raising silk- 
worms, 76 ; the silk-grass craze in, 
79 ; glass and iron works established 
and failed in, 83 ; planted tobacco, 

84 ; struck root and its life assured, 

85 ; gained impetus from the king's 
opposition, 89 ; government of, 
passed to the Crown, 92 ; reached 
its greatest prosperity, 186, n. 8 ; 
inhospitable to Lord Baltimore, 
230 ; opposes Roman Catholics, 
231, 261, n. 9 ; reckless living of 
people and clergy, 231 ; expulsion 
of Lord Baltimore from, 232 ; new 
emigration to, 344 ; second genera- 
tion of native Virginians appears, 
345 ; better ministers in the par- 
ishes and order in the courts, 345. 

Virginia colony, map of, by John 
White, 1586, 8, 21, 22. 

Virginia Company, letter of, to Gov- 
ernor Wyatt quoted, 22, n. 5 ; code 
of lavv^s and orders for its colonists, 
26 ; swindled and robbed, 52 ; fall of 
the lottery, 53 ; revival of interest, 
53 ; records destroyed, 54 ; change 
in conduct of affairs, 55 ; cruelty 



of agents paralleled by those of the 
East India Company, 67, n. 9 ; 
overthrow of the company, 70, n. 
16 ; dissolved in 1624, 85, 89, 92 ; 
organized for trading, 86 ; passed 
out of the control of traders, 87 ; 
King James interferes with the 
election, 88 ; grants two charters 
and a liberal patent to the Pilgrims, 
172 ; also leave to establish a pro- 
visional government, 173 ; Lord 
Faltimore a member and councilor 
of, 224, 229, 230 ; attempt to take 
away privileges granted to the colo- 
nists, 230. 

Virginia Company's Manuscript Rec- 
ords. See Manuscript Records, 
Virginia Company. 

Virginia Richly Valued, 79, m. ; 95, 

?■>. 
Virginians obliged to pay quitrents in 

Maryland, 249. 

Vries, David P. de, Voyages, 308, n. 7. 

Waddington's Congregational History, 
167, m. 

Walker's First Church in Hartford, 
317, m. ; 321, m. 

Ward's Simple Cobbler, 28 5, m.; 299, m. 

Warwick, second Earl, intrigues to 
wreck the Virginia Company, 51, 
68, n. 13 ; protects Argall in his 
plundering, 52 ; has Cavendish and 
others arrested, 69, n. 13 ; loses in- 
fluence in the company, 87 ; made 
Governor in Chief and Lord High 
Admiral of all plantations in Amer- 
ica, 252. 

Waterhouse's Declaration of Virginia, 
22, n. 6. 

Watertown church, part of, ready to 
follow Hooker, 323 ; one of the cen- 
tres of discontent, 324. 

Welde's Short Stoiy of the Rise, Reign, 
and Ruine of Antinomianism, 330, 
m.;336,m.; 339,m.; 340,m.; 347,n.4. 

Wentworth, friend of Calvert, 222. 

West, insubordinate settlers under, 
37, 60, n. 2 ; Indians hostile to, 60, 
n. 2 ; treacherous and cruel, 64, n. 4. 

West India plants tried in Virginia, 82. 

Weston Documents, 11, m. 

Wethersfield, John Oldham and his 
company settled at, 324. 

W^eymouth kidnapped Maine Indians, 
17- 



Zl^ 



The Beginners of a Nation. 



Whale-fishing in Lake Ontario, il. 

Whelewright, brother-in-law of Mrs. 
Hutchinson, 336 ; banished at No- 
vember court following the synod, 
337 ; testimony regarding his sister- 
in-law, 348, n. 6. 

Whelewright's sermon, 331, m. 

Whincop charter not used, 1S4, n. 4 ; 
1S6, n. 8. 

Whiston a place of Puritan assem- 
blage, 142. 

Whitaker, Alexander, praises Dale, 
66, n. 9 ; minister at Henrico, i63 ; 
letters, 183, n. 3. 

Whitaker's Good Newes from Vir- 
ginia, 66, n. 9 ; 16S. 

Whitbourne, Captain, pamphlet on 
Newfoundland, 224, 258, n. 3 ; let- 
ters of Wynne and others in, 229, 
m. 

White, Father, Relatio Itineris, 243, 
m. ; 244, m. ; 263, n. 16 ; on settle- 
ment of Montserrat, 261, n. 9 ; 263, 
n. 14, n. 16. 

White, John, of Dorchester, an active 
colonizer, 189, 199, 203. 

White, John, map of Virginia by, 
1586, 8 ; in Grenville Collection, 
21, n. 4 ; reproduced in the Century 
Magazine, 22, n. 4 ; copy in Kohl 
Collection, 22, n. 4 

White's, John, The Planter's Plea, 
igo, m. ; 199, m. 

W^hitgift, Archl3ishop, efforts of, to sup- 
press nonconformity, 122 ; ordered 
Eownd's book called in, 132 ; per- 
secuted the Puritans at Scrooby, 153; 
declared King James inspired, 161. 

Whittingham, Dean of Durham, au- 
thor of A Brieff Discourse, 135, n. 3 ; 
on the Puritan side in Frankfort, 

143- 
Williams, Roger, in advance of his 
age, 256 ; opposed the authorities 
in Massachusetts, 267 ; early career 
of, 268 ; refused preferments, 269, 
307, n. 2 ; flight of, to New Eng- 
land, 270 ; refuses communion with 
the Boston church, 270, 307, n. 3 ; 
opposed to compromise, 271, 307, 
n. 4 ; his selection as minister at 
Salem opposedby the General Court, 
271, 272 ; removed to Plymouth, 
272 ; wrote a treatise on the dialect 
of the New England Indians, 273 ; 
rebuked Bradford and wrote against 



the royal patents, 274, 281, 308, n. 
9 ; returned to Salem with some 
followers, 275 ; his ideal too high 
for that age, 281 ; preached without 
holding office, 281 ; " convented at 
court," 281 ; charges against, based 
on his book, " not so evil as at first 
they seemed," 282 ; the broad prin- 
ciple laid down by, 283 ; made 
teacher at Salem, 284 ; fast-day ser- 
mon on eleven " public sins," 286 ; 
dealt with ecclesiastically, 287 ; 
scruples against enforced oaths, 
289 ; new charges against, 289 ; 
champion of soul liberty, 290 ; in- 
corrigible, 290, 291 ; trial and ban- 
ishment, 292, 309, n. 12 ; 310, n. 
13, 14, 16 ; authorities, 310, n. 17 ; 
on account of illness permitted to 
remain during the winter, 293 ; a 
few friends faithful to, 293, 294 ; es- 
cape to the Indians, 295 ; abandons 
settlement at Seekonk River and 
founds Providence, 296 ; banish- 
ment of, an act of persecution, 297 ; 
character of, 301, 307, n. i ; a col- 
lector of scruples, 301, 302, 314, n. 
23 ; tenderness and friendship for 
Winthrop, 302 ; became a Baptist 
and renounced his baptism, 303 ; a 
Seeker, 303, 304 ; his moral eleva- 
tion of spirit, 304 ; ascendency over 
the Indians, 305 ; an individual- 
ist, 291, 305 ; superior to his age 
and ours, 305 ; his prophetic char- 
acter, 306 ; a John Baptist of the 
distant future, 306 ; enthusiastic 
nature of, 307, n. 2 ; needed no 
practical consideration to stir him 
to action, 30S, n. ii ; magnanimity 
without a parallel, 310, n. 15 ; re- 
moval of Williams and his friends 
the beginning of dispersions from 
the colony, 315 ; prepared a harbor 
for all of uneasy conscience, 315. 

Williams's letter to Mrs. Sadleir, 26S, 
m. ; 270, m. ; letters to Winthrop, 
273, m. ; 302, m. ; 307, n. 5 ; Reply 
to Cotton, 283, m. ; letters to Lady 
Barrington, 307, n. I ; Letter to John 
Cotton, the younger, 307, n. 2, 3, 
4 ; letter to Major Mason, 310, n. 
15 ; Bloudy Tenent, 311, n. 18. 

Wilson, John, interprets battle of 
mouse and snake, 277 ; on Wil- 
liams's book, 2S2 ; condemned by 



Index. 



377 



the Hutchinsonians, 333 ; given to 
rhyming prophecies, 338. 

Windebank, schemes of Cecilius Cal- 
veil with, 250. 

Wine, eflbrts to produce, in Great 
Britain, 76 ; in Virginia, 81. 

Wingandacon, Indian name of the 
coast of North Carolina, 21, n. 3. 

Wingfield deposed from leadership, 
31 ; recognizes Smith's services, 36 ; 
plot against the life of, 61, n. 2 ; 
warned Newport against Archer, 64, 
n. 3: 

Wingfield's Discourse, 64, n. 3. 

Winslow, of Plymouth, warns Wil- 
liams from Seekonk River, 2g6. 

Winslow's Briefe Narration, 172, m. ; 
175, m. ; 185, n. 6. 

Winsor's, Justin, Elder Brewster, 155, 
m. ; 169, m. 

Winsor's Narrative and Critical His- 
tory of America, 21, n. i. 

Wintlirop, John, principal figure in 
the Puritan migration, 202 ; char- 
acter and influence of, 204 ; made a 
justice of the peace, 204, 217, n. 5 ; 
elected governor, 210, 217, n. 6 ; 
objected to a government directed 
from England, 208 ; superseded by 
Dudley, 287 ; recommended Narra- 
gansett Bay to Williams, 293, 294 ; 
lenity toward Williams rebuked, 
301 ; moved house, begun at New- 
town, to Boston, 318 ; antipathy to 
Mrs. Hutchinson, 330 ; ministers 
rally around, 332 ; again made gov- 
ernor, 335 ; chief inquisitor at the 
trial of Mrs. Plutchinson, 338 ; evi- 
dence to prove Mrs. Hutchinson a 
witch, 340, 341 ; wallows in super- 
stition, 341. 

Winthrop's Journal (Savage's), 252, 
m ; 272, m. ; 290, m. ; 291, m. ; 294, 
m. ; 301, m. ; 307, n. 3 ; 309, n. 12 ; 
310, n. 17 ; 318, m. ; 323, m. ; 329, 
m.; 336, m.; 339, m.; 340, m.; 341, 
m. ; 344, m. ; 348, n. 8 ; 349, n. 9. 

Winthrop's Life and Letters, 198, m.; 
217, n. 4, 5, 6; 218, n. 8. 



Winthrop's Reasons for New Eng- 
land, 198, 204, 217, n. 4. 
Wives for the Virginia colonists, 57, 

71, n. 18 ; supplied to Louisiana 

and Canada, 72, n. 18. 
Vv'omen, proposal to send, to Virginia, 

71, n. 18 ; in Gates's party, 71, n. 

18 ; first two in the colony, 71, n. 18. 
Wood, beauty of the, of certain 

American trees, 65, n. 7. 
Woodnoth's Short Collection, 70, n. 

16 ; 87, m. ; account of, 97, n. 10. 
Wood's New England's Prospect, 18, 

m. ; 318, m. ; 319, m. 
Words had the force of blows, no. 
W'right's Elizabeth and her Times, 

142, m. 
Wyatt, Sir Francis, name appended 

to The Tragicall Relation, 66, n. 9 ; 

opinion of, on a divided govern- 
ment, 207. 
Wyckoff, on Silk Manufacture, 95, 

n. 3. 

Yeardley, Sir George, arrival in Vir- 
ginia, 71, n. 17 ; knighted, 134, n. 
I ; instructed to administer oath of 
supremacy, 232. 

Yong, Thomas, in the Delaware, 10 ; 
seeks a Mediterranean in America, 
II. 

Young's Chronicles of Massachusetts, 
217, n. 4 ; 317, m. 

Young's Chronicles of the Pilgrims, 
158, n. 3 ; 167, m. ; 184, n. 4. 

Yucatan, meaning of, 21, n. 3. 

Yucca, clothing made from the fiber 
of the, 79, 80; a "commodiiie of 
speciall hope and much use," So. 

Zeal, passionate, often stupefies rea- 
son, 171. 

Zurich and Strasburg cities of refuge 
for conservatives, 104 ; differences 
between exiles at, and those of Ge- 
neva, 106, 107. 

Zurich Letters, 135, n. 3. 

Zwisck, Peter John, The Liberty of 
Religion, 312, n. 19. 



Charles Alexander Nelson, 



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